In 2014 John Regehr and colleagues suggested what he called Friendly C[0], in an attempt to salvage C from UB. About bit more than a year later, he concluded that the project wasn't really feasible because people couldn't agree on the details of what Friendly C should be.[1]

In the second post, there's an interesting comment towards the end:

> Luckily there’s an easy away forward, which is to skip the step where we try to get consensus. Rather, an influential group such as the Android team could create a friendly C dialect and use it to build the C code (or at least the security-sensitive C code) in their project. My guess is that if they did a good job choosing the dialect, others would start to use it, and at some point it becomes important enough that the broader compiler community can start to help figure out how to better optimize Friendly C without breaking its guarantees, and maybe eventually the thing even gets standardized. There’s precedent for organizations providing friendly semantics; Microsoft, for example, provides stronger-than-specified semantics for volatile variables by default on platforms other than ARM.

I would argue that this has happened, but not quite in the way he expected. Google (and others) has chosen a way forward, but rather than somehow fixing C they have chosen Rust. And from what I see happening in the tech space, I think that trend is going to continue: love it or hate it, the future is most likely going to be Rust encroaching on C, with C increasinly being relegated to the "legacy" status like COBOL and Fortran. In the words of Ambassador Kosh: "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote."

0: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1180 1: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1287