1. There is no such thing as a safe or unsafe language. Safety is relative and impossible to guarantee. Even "memory safety" often just means "memory tradeoffs"

1. There is no such thing as a safe or unsafe language. Safety is relative and impossible to guarantee. Even "memory safety" often just means "memory tradeoffs". 2. Inline assembly is often a necessary evil to create implementations of crypto libraries in C... not using it would be worse. 3. It's all machine code under the covers. Whether one developer poorly juggles chainsaws or your high-level language poorly juggles chainsaws is not a question of better or worse, but taste. 4. It's X.509. It sucks in every language. 5. Just because it's in C doesn't mean it sucks. There are alternative libraries that intentionally avoid sucky design. (https://nacl.cr.yp.to/internals.html https://nacl.cr.yp.to/internals.html) 6. Show me another language that's as portable and powerful as C, and cryptographers will probably start using it.