The problem is that C is a prehistoric language and don't have any of the complex types for example. So, in a modern language you create a String. That string will have a length, and some well defined properties (like encoding and such). With C you have a char * , which is just a pointer to the memory that contains bytes, and hopefully is null terminated. The null termination is defined, but not enforced. Any encoding is whatever the developer had in mind. So the compiler just don't have the information to make any decisions. In rust you know exactly how long something lives, if something try to use it after that, the compiler can tell you. With C, all lifetimes lives in the developers head, and the compiler have no way of knowing. So, all these typing and properties of modern languages, are basically the implementation of your suggestion.

Modern C compilers have a lot of features you can use to check for example for memory errors. Rusts borrow-checker is much stricter as it's designed to be part of the language, but for low-level code like the Linux kernel you'll end up having to use Rust's unsafe feature on a lot of code to do things from talking to actual hardware to just implementing certain data structures and then Rust is about as good as C.

Compilers follow specs and in some cases you can have undefined behavior. You can and should use compiler flags but should complement that with good programming practices (e.g. TDD) and other tools in your pipeline (such as valgrind).