> > A lot of existing code is already safe. > Again, I am not trying to argue either way. The point I was making was about how you can't define away all UB in

> > A lot of existing code is already safe. > Again, I am not trying to argue either way. The point I was making was about how you can't define away all UB in the C standard without needing to modify the language in a breaking way. This depends on how you define "breaking". I think one can add annotations and transform a lot of C code to memory safe C with slight refactoring without introducing changes into the language that would break any existing code. You can not simply switch on a flag make existing code safe ... except you can do this too ... it just then comes with a high run-time cost for checking. > > > No but rust provides a proper type system which goes a long way to being able to prove and enforce a lot more about program behavior at compile time. > > You could transform a lot of C code to be memory safe by adding annotations and do some light refactoring and maybe pushing some residual pieces to "unsafe" blocks. This would be very similar to Rust. > It would only be somewhat similar to super basic entry level rust which ignores all the opportunities for type checking. I do not believe you can solve a lot more issues with strong typing than you can already solve in C simply by building good abstractions.