You're missing the point in actually a really important way. Nobody is claiming that C makes it impossible to cleanly do the right thing—obviously the whole wo

You're missing the point in actually a really important way. Nobody is claiming that C makes it impossible to cleanly do the right thing—obviously the whole world runs on C. The point is that nothing about the C language, libraries, or toolchain discourage the example given in the blogpost compared to your more correct code. Unless you remember exactly the right details from the manpages, there's nothing about the example in the blogpost that's less natural to write than your more correct code. (And people do forget those details: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/08/19/fork/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/08/19/fork/ ) By contrast, as illustrated in the blogpost, the most natural way to do the same thing in Rust turns out to be the more correct thing. If you wanted the bad behavior to happen, you'd have to go out of your way to pass -1 to kill(). Hence in this example, Rust's design is an improvement. It's great that C gives you enough rope to hang yourself with, but it's even better if tying yourself to things safely is easy, and to hang yourself you have to really go out of your way.