I don't know if you're aware, but there is a demonstration of wget (a fellow "gnu utility", right?) being auto-translated to a memory-safe subset of C++ [1]. Because the translation essentially does a one-for-one substitution of potentially unsafe C elements with safe C++ counterparts that mirror the behavior, the translation should be much less susceptible to the introduction of new bugs and behaviors in the way a rewrite would be.

With a little cleaning-up of the original code, the code translation ends up being fully automatic and so can be used as a build step to produce (slightly slower) memory-safe executables from the original C source.

[1] https://duneroadrunner.github.io/scpp_articles/PoC_autotrans...