Linux

I don't have much experience in C, but I'm not sure if bringing Rust's ideas over to C would help.
As I understand, a lot of problems come from either that arrays are actually just pointers and if you don't enforce it's length for yourself then no one will, and in practice they span the entire area of process memory dorwards and backwards too. Or from that you free memory at the wrong time, or you never do that at all.
You can't make mistakes with the first thing in Rust because the compiler takes note of the array's length, and you just can't abuse it as it won't compile then. The second is a nonissue too, as memory management is automatic (kind of).

Fixing C sounds to me like patching up a sieve. That language was designed with those features in mind that make it error prone, and changing them would result in a different language. You would have to change your program anyway, and that probably wouldn't be a small renovation. Also, you often can't afford to not use pointers, because that's how you pass things by reference in C, and besides passing by reference being important for performance reasons (to avoid copies) that's the only option if so you have is a pointer to something, and when it's stored in the heap.