So it strikes me that a new language may be the wrong approach to addressing C's issues. Can they truly not be addressed with C itself?
E.g., here's a list of some commonly mentioned issues:
* standard library is godawful, and composed almost entirely of foot guns. New languages fix this by providing new standard libraries. But that can be done just as well with C.
* lack of help with safety. The solutions people put forward generally involve some combination of static analysis disallowing potentially unsafe operations, runtime checks, and provided implementations of mechanisms around potentially unsafe operations (like allocators, and slices). Is there any reason these cannot be done with C (in fact, I know they all have been done).
* lack of various modern conveniences. I think there's two aspects of this. One is aesthetics -- people can feel that C code is inelegant or ugly. Since that's purely a matter of personal taste, we have to set that aside. The other is that C can often be pretty verbose. Although the syntax is terse, its low-level nature means that, in practice, you can end up writing a relatively large number of lines of code to do fairly simple things. C alternatives tend to provide syntax conveniences that streamline common & preferred patterns. But it strikes me that an advanced enough autocomplete would provide the same convenience (albeit without the terseness). We happen to have entered the age of advanced autocomplete.
Building a new language, along with the ecosystem to support it, is a lot of fun. But it also seems like a very inefficient way to address C's issues because you have to recreate so much (including all the things about C that aren't broken), and you have to reach some critical mass of adoption/usage to become relevant and sustainable. And to be frank, it's also a pretty ineffective way to address C's issues because it doesn't actually do anything to help all the existing C code. Very few projects are in a position to be rewritten. Much better would be to have a fine-grained set of solutions that code bases could adopt incrementally according to need and opportunity
Of course, I realize all this has been happening with C all along. I'm just pointing out that seems like the right approach, while these C alternatives, while fun and exciting (as far as these things go), they are probably just sound and fury that will ultimately fade away. (In fact, it might be worse if some catch on... C and all the C code bases will still be there, we'll just have more fragmentation.)