The main strength of a memory-safe language is that the safety mechanisms are opt-out, not opt-in: you can confine the unsafe behavior to a small, manageable portion of the codebase. And trying to "fix" C to become a memory-safe language would probably just result in something like a Rust dialect that merely bears more superficial resemblance to C. In any case, thorough re-writing of existing codebases would be required. You might as well re-write in a language that currently exists, rather than add creating a new language to the top of the to-do list.