> Attempts to retrofit safely to C have been around a lot longer than Cheri; fil-c is just the latest and there's no obvious reason why it should be more successful.

It is true that memory-safe C compilers have existed for decades and have seen minimal adoption.

However, improvements to clang/llvm could yield wider impact and benefit than previous efforts, since they may be supported in a widely used C toolchain.

-fbounds-safety is another change that may see more adoption if it makes it into mainline clang/llvm

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafetyAdoptionGuide.html