I don't see where this is coming from. Most of the world's top filesystems are written in C, and they work just fine. Maybe other languages could get better results, but it's hard to say with so little data.
> implementation knowledge about file system technology is generally stuck in the 1990s
If you are talking about me, that might be true, I'm relatively new to this and still learning. But there's definitely people out there with some serious "implementation knowledge". And tools like xfstests did not exist in the 1990s, that makes a huge difference.
And for specific examples of options with better safety records, then sure Rust would be one possibility, as would Ada, or Frama-C if you need to stick with C.
> I'm simply disputing your general claim that moving away from C would not help
I never said such a thing, I said we don't know. As always, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is.
• C being a shitty language that does not force or even encourage programmers to handle errors
• implementation knowledge about file system technology is generally stuck in the 1990s
• disk controller hardware lying to the OS to make them appear more performant than they really are
visit https://danluu.com & ctrl+f "files"