I hope this idea of taking the complexity of memory management and encoding it in the language syntax is an evolutionary dead end, because that Rust code looks

I hope this idea of taking the complexity of memory management and encoding it in the language syntax is an evolutionary dead end, because that Rust code looks genuinely painful. Otherwise I agree that a rewrite is nonsense. In these kinds of huge projects, only a gradual solution that can co-exist with the existing code base could work, if anything. An example would be tightening the safety of the existing code through static analysis of the kind offered by Frama-C.