RC: a dialect of C that adds safe, region-based memory management (2001)

It looks like an important difference between RC and Rust is that RC enforces at runtime (via reference counting) what Rust enforces at compile time via the borrow checker.

It was interesting. My favorite in this category is SoftBound + CETS given its stronger protections:

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~santosh.nagarakatte/softbound/

Also integrates with LLVM and has a hardware-accelerated variant. Could be combined with Rocket RISC-V, Gaisler SPARC, or Cambrige BERI MIPS CPU's.

Looks rather old to me

C is probably older.

The user manual is from 2001, interesting idea nevertheless.

Cyclone is another interesting project that adds regions to C (and much much more )

https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/wiki/User%20Manual/

unfortunately it doesn't look maintained anymore ,which is a pity because the language looks fantastic. Just learned about it this year...

AFAIK Cyclone was a major inspiration for Rust, so you could say its legacy lives on.

https://twitter.com/rustlang/status/528221679961399296

Timestamp in files is June 29, 2001.