Are you talking about dropping pointers as a programmer-facing programming language concept (in which case you might find Hylo and similar languages interesting), or dropping pointers from everything - programming languages, their implementations, compilers, etc. (in which case I'm not sure that's even possible)?

For a system programming language the right solution is to properly track aliasing information in the type system as done in Rust.

Aliasing issues is just yet another instance of C/C++ inferiority holding the industry back. C could've learnt from Fortran, but we ended up with the language we have...