Comment by gordaco

Thank you, this really had to be said. You can do C in C++ (and if you do that, chances are that you're doing it wrong), but you can't do C++ in C. The ugliest and unsafe parts of C++ are invariably those coming almost untouched from C (raw pointers, casts from/to void ptrs, etc). C is close to the machine, but C++ is largely a vertical language where you can do things low-level or high-level (and yes, you can do a lot of interesting things with templates, no matter the bad rap they've got); and most of the current C++ community vastly prefers high-level-like code, for good reasons (for starters, it may be even more performant). A LOT of the sources of unsafe code go away by two simple techniques: use RAII-managed smart pointers instead of raw ones (some of them are as lightweight as a raw pointer), and prefer vector (or other container) to array.

I love C and C++, and each one has its place, but really, they're very different. Almost as much as C++ is to Java, for example.