I think these situations are very different, because Weird Rust affects only weird code, while unsafety of C affects regular C code.
The difficulty in reviewing pointer dereferences is in reasoning about potential program's states and necessary preconditions, which C won't do for you. You can have neatly written C using very simple syntax, and still have no idea if it's safe or not. Solving that lack of clarity requires much than syntax-level changes.
OTOH the Weird Rust examples are not a problem you get in your own code. It's a local syntax problem, and it doesn't require complex whole-program reasoning. The stakes are also lower, because you still have the same safety checks, type checks, automatic memory management, immutability. The compiler aggressively warns about unreachable code and unused/unread variables, so it's not easy to write undetected Weird code.
Rust tried having Underhanded Code Contest, but it has been very Underwhelming.
The difficulty in reviewing pointer dereferences is in reasoning about potential program's states and necessary preconditions, which C won't do for you. You can have neatly written C using very simple syntax, and still have no idea if it's safe or not. Solving that lack of clarity requires much than syntax-level changes.
OTOH the Weird Rust examples are not a problem you get in your own code. It's a local syntax problem, and it doesn't require complex whole-program reasoning. The stakes are also lower, because you still have the same safety checks, type checks, automatic memory management, immutability. The compiler aggressively warns about unreachable code and unused/unread variables, so it's not easy to write undetected Weird code.
Rust tried having Underhanded Code Contest, but it has been very Underwhelming.