Sure, but if you only ever give people safety scissors then you're severely limiting the kinds of things that they can build. You have to let people who know what they are doing be able to do what they need to do, so you have to be able to turn the runtime safety off. Zig can do this at the scope level.
If you dont want full control like in C++, a language would be nice that has one specific style, one specific way to do things, and so on. Go(lang) is quite close to this, in my experience. You can't do thread safety wrong, because there's only really one way, and so on.
I would love a language with
1. Explicit nullable types (not like Java's "anything can be null" design), so everything is a non-nullable reference type unless its "optional<T>" for example. I strongly support the idea of a nullable type only being used where it being null carries information.
2. Strong typing - like, tungsten strong. Implicit conversions need to be compiler errors, no implicit constructors, etc. with simple explicit casting
3. One style - and it better not be Java-like forced-OOP.
4. Full and clear memory control, RAII support, no gc. I need my RAM for other stuff.
I'm not sure if there's a language like that out there. I don't care for library support, I just want a fun language.
- value types
- stackalloc is safe since C# 7
- SafeHandles since C# 2.0
- IDispose interface
- IDispose like Dispose() since C# 8
- Marshal class since C# 1.0
- Span<>() classes since C# 7
- static lambdas since C# 9
- native function pointers since C# 9
If you're really responsible, it's possible to use the system allocator to inform the system about how much memory your allocations consume so that the memory pressure triggers have a correct accounting of how much memory is being used.
The new gc is pretty much compiler assisted scope managed smart pointers as well. Also when using the gc you can build your own types with custom create/free/copy/move operators to do what you want without worrying about a stop the world gc.
Using the arc gc pretty much compiles down to what you'd do manually. For cycles you can use the orc gc, again it's all opt in.
I find this a great balance of productivity and performance, where it's easy to have high control when you want it, and still get good performance when you're not bothered.
With the new ARC & move semantics, Nim has hit a sweet spot, IMHO. It's like the language struggled to find a fit for a long time. But ARC allows very low overhead memory safety, perfect for mcu's and wasm in particular.
Though perhaps Swift could be a contender in this arena as well with its ARC, but it's development is so Apple centric.
What's interesting to me is that with move semantics and smarter compiler analysis, an ARC based GC overhead approaches that of Rust's compile time lifetime memory management. For any non-trivial program Rust seems to use a lot of Rc's or copies to get around lifetime analysis issues. So if the compiler can automatically figure out lifetimes in code it can eliminate many ARC operations.
I hope more languages adopt more flexible ARC based gc's or improve on rusts ergonomics.
It makes for a very performant pure functional language. My only gripe is that the stdlib is abysmal, and hardcoded into the compiler.
Then on the past languages that failed to gain steam, Mesa/Cedar, Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon, Oberon-07, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Eiffel, Sing#, System C#, Component Pascal, among many others.
The only thing missing is that many are badly taught, use new everywhere and don't bother to fully understand all language features.