The problem is that it isn't a new idea. People keep trying it as shown below. Unfortunately, C wasn't designed so much as a modified version of something (BCPL

The problem is that it isn't a new idea. People keep trying it as shown below. Unfortunately, C wasn't designed so much as a modified version of something (BCPL) that was the only collection of features Richards could get to compile on his crappy hardware. It's not designed for easy analysis or safety. So, all the attempts are going to hit problems in what legacy code they can support, their performance, or even effectiveness if about reliability/security in a pointer-heavy language. Compare that to Ada, Wirth's stuff, or Modula-3 to find they don't have that problem or have much less of it because they were carefully designed balancing the various tradeoffs. Ada even meets author's criteria for safe language with explicit memory representation despite him saying safe languages don't have that. To back that up with references, first is a bunch of attempts at safer C's or C-like languages with performance issues. The next two are among most recent and practical at memory safety for C apps far as CompSci goes. The last one is an Ada book that lists by chapter each technique its designer used to systematically mitigate bugs or vulnerabilities in systems code. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a890/a850dc78e65e26f8f4def435b17094ce08cf.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a890/a850dc78e65e26f8f4def4... https://llvm.org/pubs/2006-06-12-PLDI-SAFECode.html https://llvm.org/pubs/2006-06-12-PLDI-SAFECode.html https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~santosh.nagarakatte/softbound/ https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~santosh.nagarakatte/softbound/ http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical-papers/SafeSecureAdav2015-covered.pdf http://www.adacore.com/uploads/technical-papers/SafeSecureAd...