In theory, they could. In practice, I would be shocked. As an example, Rust's memory safety rules are fundamentally built on top of generics, which C does not have. So in order to copy what Rust does, they'd need to do that first, and that's a massive change to the language.
C++ does have generics already (well templates, but you know) and so it'd be an easier lift there, but it's still a lot of work. https://safecpp.org/draft.html explains how this would be possible.
C++ does have generics already (well templates, but you know) and so it'd be an easier lift there, but it's still a lot of work. https://safecpp.org/draft.html explains how this would be possible.