Most of this can be done just fine in practice. NULL safety is not so much an issue as people claim as trapping is safe on most implementations and then similar to a panic in other languages. If you create data types via constructors you can then make sure those are initialized. Yes, this is a convention but easy to check. The const issue is not a problem IMHO. If you violate type safety yourself then this comparable to using escape hatches in other languages. Only the never-leave-this-thread point is something where Rust truly has an advantage, but one can have abstract data types that are thread-safe in C.

This is why I think a book is missing, people think C is much worse than it is because they do not understand what can be achieved.