We clearly need more/better tooling in this area in C).

I think the tooling we have nowadays is better than we give it credit for. Between clang's analyser, ASAN, Infer and tis-interpreter, I often find when someone points out a vulnerability, I can get one of these tools to make an issue of it.

Note I'm not suggesting this is enough to make C safe.

Edit: A quick demonstration, based on 30 seconds with valgrind. If I run with ./bin/massdns --help, it makes a malloc() on line 595, then exits on 605 without free()ing. And yes I know this isn't really an issue in practice, but it demonstrates that the tools can see issues.