Programmer Humor

I don't think you would get much traction on C developers' existing projects. C gives you the option to do everything your way. If the developer's paradigm doesn't agree with the borrow checker, it could become a rewrite anyway.

Most projects don't use the newer c standards. The language just doesn't change much, and C devs like that. This might get a better response from the modern C++ crowd, but then you are missing a large chunk of the world.

No C program is written to satisfy a borrow checker and most wouldn't compile with one, so adding it would require rewriting the world anyways. At that point why not choose a language that, in addition to being memory safe, also drastically cuts down on other kinds of UB, has sum types, sane error handling, a (mostly) thread safe standard library, etc.?

I struggle to learn rust because the semantics and syntax are just so awful. I would love to be enthusiastic about rust, since every seems to love it, but I can't get over that hurdle. Backporting the features into C, or even just making a transpiler from C to rust that uses annotations would be great for me. But the rust community really does not seem interested in making stepping stones from other languages to rust.

C++ already has much more of the required language constructs, which is why there is already an attempt to add borrow checking to C++ called circle. Until that standardizes, I wouldn't expect it in C.