To be more explicit, C stays around despite the memory unsafeness because the code written without exceptions just works so well. In the 90s, I worked writing i

To be more explicit, C stays around despite the memory unsafeness because the code written without exceptions just works so well. In the 90s, I worked writing in C long lived servers that had the philosophy to never ever exit because of bytes read from the network and always trigger a core dump and exit on any internal application state inconsistency. In production the process would be restarted and the stack trace emailed to the author, with core available if needed. It was possible and pretty routine to have code that would run hundreds of days, years even once the feature was basically done, without restart. Exceptions make that degree of reliability really hard for us simple minded engineers to achieve.