I would submit that C++ has enough inertia (as a language and as an ecosystem) that changing the language itself would be difficult. However, C++ is a huge lan

I would submit that C++ has enough inertia (as a language and as an ecosystem) that changing the language itself would be difficult. However, C++ is a huge language and if there's a way to enforce safety by using only a subset of the language + tooling to help you do that, your improvements could be adopted piecemeal by teams looking to level up their codebase a bit. Many languages have a way to opt in to e.g. strict type checking on a per-file basis. It would be really cool to see these improvements implemented in such a way that existing codebases could gradually adopt them.