Memory safety is something that can be added to C. For instance, Cake in safety mode requires explicit handling of potentially null return values.

http://cakecc.org/playground.html?code=I2luY2x1ZGUgPHN0ZGlvL...

Most of the problems described in Rust manuals as things C cannot prevent, such as memory leaks, double frees, and use-after-free, can be detected at compile time in Cake with very few annotations.