That would require building consensus around such a language. I mean, yes, this is one of my own hobby projects, but Rust is the most fully-developed attempt made so far and it still doesn't have the kind of developer backing that C did in the BSD days.

I am old enough to remember when C only had backing from people working on UNIX systems, while other systems were either using Assembly or another high level language e.g. PL/I, Algol or Pascal dialect.

This could catch some programming bugs, sure, but it wouldn't make the OS much safer. You can still have attacks on integrity, privacy and availability.

Agreed, but the attack window would be smaller, that is what counts.

If you really want to attack a system, nothing beats social engineering anyway.