Could also fire everyone on the C/C++standards bodies and replace them with people willing to add arrays as a first class data type.
The basic trick for backwards compatibility is that all arrays have sizes, but you get to specify the expression which represents the size and associate it with the array. So you don't need array descriptors and can keep many existing representations.
Also, if you have slices, you rarely need pointer arithmetic. Slices are pointer arithmetic with sane semantics.
I'm tired of seeing decade after decade of C/C++ buffer overflows. It speaks badly of software engineering as a profession.
[1] http://www.animats.com/papers/languages/safearraysforc43.pdf
> Gets added to Visual C/C++, LLVM, and Gnu C as an extention.
And had to do a double-take because I thought you were talking about gets(3)…
But yeah, it only works if you use those types.
There are other divisions pushing for .NET and Rust systems code in Windows, but the political wars between WinDev and DevTools are quite well known, e.g. Longhorn (in .NET) vs WinRT (same thing just in COM).