What makes you think that a safer C variant would win the hearts of UNIX kernels and embedded devs any more than C++ (which started as just a C variant).
Other OSes not tied to UNIX culture were always more open to reach out for C++, even if constrained to a certain subset.
It can compile small enough to run on an Arduino: https://github.com/stepcut/idris-blink
OS X and its descendents is the only exception.
Which goes back to NeXTSTEP using Objective-C and offering UNIX compatibility only as a path to bring software into the system, battling against SGI and Sun market space.
http://www.l4ka.org/projects/pistachio/pistachio-whitepaper....
I can see your point if you're saying compiler use lets them avoid a language they just dont want to use. Which they couldnt if using it for an OS.
I don’t necessarily think it would, but if it did, those would all be reasons
There's also some really neat language-level concurrency support; work is ongoing on new features and a shorter summary, but you can see one of our Master's student theses for details: https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/12888
While C does have longjmp and friends, usage of them is hardly idiomatic, so most C code assumes no non-local tranfer of control happens when calling functions. Coding with non-local transfer of control and without require very different idioms.
C++ was a C variant once.
It doesn't require them/us to change much, just add these flags and the compiler will warn you about things that are unsafe.
I've always found it quite sad that no one is interested in bettering C enough to push relevant changes through.
Only newbies make memory corruption errors.
Yet even Dennis acknowledged correct code mattered, and Johnson created lint in 1979!
Largely ignored until clang and its analyzers came into the scene.