Is there game for a Rust like native language over a close to assembly procedural language like C? It seems the only thing that makes predictions hard are things like fptrs and their structured v-table organization (which you can roll your own in C if you want, which almost any large project will).

I think fptrs and v-tables are fairly predictable once you know how they work. The main issue is that "good" C++ code makes heavy use of the STL, meaning that you need to know exactly how everything is implemented to understand what code will be generated. In embedded environments there can be strict timing requirements, memory restrictions, etc. That makes C++/Rust a little more scary. You might wanna ban stuff like std::vector because you never know when it will reallocate and double in size. Better to just use dumb arrays so everything is obvious.

You can implement a self expanding vector in C though, so I’m not really sure what you are gaining/losing by using C++, I guess it’s just a matter of standard library, but you can create build rules that restrict what you can depend on in low level code.

The point is that having all these complex libraries and abstractions moves you away from understanding what your code is actually doing, which is not ideal in some domains.