That's correct, it does mostly what you tell it to and stays out of the way. If you want error checking beyond the test suite you have to do it yourself. The is

That's correct, it does mostly what you tell it to and stays out of the way. If you want error checking beyond the test suite you have to do it yourself. The issues people have with C comes mostly from treating it like any other language. C is all about control and flexibility. Further, special care is taken to reduce the number of allocations, often using pools/slab allocators. And value semantics, or rather byte array semantics, which means items are treated as blocks of N bytes rather than pointers/references.