I don't think you're giving Rust enough credit here.
For those projects that don't use any unsafe, we can say -- absent compiler bugs or type system unsoundness -- that there will be no memory leaks or data races or undefined behavior. That's useful! Very useful!
For projects that do need unsafe, that unsafe code can be cordoned off into a corner where it can be made as small as possible, and can be audited. The rest of the code base is just as safe as one with no unsafe at all. This is also very useful!
Now, sure, if most projects needed to use unsafe, and/or if most projects had to write a significant amount of unsafe, then sure, I'd agree with you. But that's just not the reality for nearly all projects.
With C, everything is unsafe. Everything can have memory leaks or data races or undefined behavior. Audits for these issues need to examine every single line of code. Compilers and linters and sanitizers can help you here, but they can never be comprehensive or guarantee the absence of problems.
I've been writing C for more than 20 years now. I still write memory leaks. I still write NULL pointer dereferences. I still struggle sometimes to get my data ownership (and/or locking) right when I have to write multithreaded code. When I get to write Rust, I'm so happy that I don't have to worry about those things, or spend time with valgrind or ASAN or clang's scan-build to figure out what I've done wrong. Rust lets me focus more on what I actually care about, the actual code and algorithms and structure of my program.
There were lots of projects at Apple that never made it off the ground.
When I was there in '88-'90 I remember seeing a few prototypes of their Mobius computer - an ARM-based system that emulated an Apple II much faster, and was (unfortunately) faster than a Mac II in native mode. It got canned before they ever got around to designing a case for it, but folks who had the prototypes kept them for quite a while.
I made a little project taking this idea to an extreme. The idea was, that you should be able to generate "meme" image macros simply by typing a URL. That way you could create memes on the fly anywhere that you can enter a URL (Slack/Twitter/Facebook/etc.) without having to leave the app. Just type a URL of the form:
will get you colors in macOS. I'm sure a lot of people will like the icons but they're not for me. Around last year I got burned out on things nagging for my attention by bouncing, booping, turning red, popping up a pretty picture. Turning off all notifications on my phone was a good first step.
おまけ：
Here is the "ultimate" OSX ls that I found on the internet some time ago:
alias l="ls -aeGhlO@"
Of course that is too much information sometimes, so I kept a vanilla ls too:
For those projects that don't use any unsafe, we can say -- absent compiler bugs or type system unsoundness -- that there will be no memory leaks or data races or undefined behavior. That's useful! Very useful!
For projects that do need unsafe, that unsafe code can be cordoned off into a corner where it can be made as small as possible, and can be audited. The rest of the code base is just as safe as one with no unsafe at all. This is also very useful!
Now, sure, if most projects needed to use unsafe, and/or if most projects had to write a significant amount of unsafe, then sure, I'd agree with you. But that's just not the reality for nearly all projects.
With C, everything is unsafe. Everything can have memory leaks or data races or undefined behavior. Audits for these issues need to examine every single line of code. Compilers and linters and sanitizers can help you here, but they can never be comprehensive or guarantee the absence of problems.
I've been writing C for more than 20 years now. I still write memory leaks. I still write NULL pointer dereferences. I still struggle sometimes to get my data ownership (and/or locking) right when I have to write multithreaded code. When I get to write Rust, I'm so happy that I don't have to worry about those things, or spend time with valgrind or ASAN or clang's scan-build to figure out what I've done wrong. Rust lets me focus more on what I actually care about, the actual code and algorithms and structure of my program.