Comment by lanstin

I wrote 10s of thousands of lines of C code in the 90s and early 00s (without buffer overflows that I learned about; I did also write a evil network layer for inducing buffer overflows in my and my dependencies code), and have been doing a lot of other languages since then, and then had occasion to write some more C where I was doing string allocation and manipulation (for a LD_PRELOAD to monitor what various programs I lacked source to where doing), and it was absolutely nerve wracking. Linux kernel might be mostly C for a long time, but it would be crazy to start a new thing in C. There's growing re-write projects from C to Rust. It would be farther along except the Rust people seem to dislike laboriously recreating decades of GNU long-opt functionality in all these base packages to actually make Rust drop-in replacements for C.

Maybe for embedded, I haven't done that, but for general purpose, I can't imagine it being worth the risks.