I'd say that this is Rust. Ensuring at compile time that references are handled in a memory safe manner (borrow checking) requires a certain amount of complexit

I'd say that this is Rust. Ensuring at compile time that references are handled in a memory safe manner (borrow checking) requires a certain amount of complexity. There are of course plenty of memory safe languages more syntactically and semantically similar to C which just use a garbage collector. D and Go for instance.