Memory safety in a general sense of "just" computing things and getting an answer has been solved for a long while by using either garbage collection or static,

Memory safety in a general sense of "just" computing things and getting an answer has been solved for a long while by using either garbage collection or static, bounds-checked, allocation with handles and liveness checks. It's the intermediate space where you can allocate byte buffers and make pointer structures willy-nilly that is troublesome, and idiomatic C sends you in that direction like flypaper. Rust is useful in addressing that specific space - with qualification, since of course it concedes to pragmatism and lets you do an "unsafe" where you want to break the rules. But I believe the future of low-level is more in the realm of original open-hardware designs, because you CAN design a computer that builds in the kinds of runtime checks that are currently done in software. It just isn't the focus of companies that want to sell a lot of bells-and-whistles silicon.