> How do you explain both that severe reaction to using C AND the historically negligible failure rate of the language itself? You CAN get from point A to poin

> How do you explain both that severe reaction to using C AND the historically negligible failure rate of the language itself? You CAN get from point A to point B by riding a horse, but why would you when cars are a faster alternative? But to the point, many failures have been attributed to the language, most of security bugs stem from the C's lack of memory safety. _Fortunately_ the reason not a whole lot of deaths can be attributed dirrectly to C is the fact that: - The safety critical sw is has multiple redundancies baked in, including at the HW level that would safeguard against fatal outcomes. - Safety critical SW is tested intensley. This proves the "common" cases of usage, but in my experience still fails for long-tail events. - Memory corruption issues would most of the cases "mearly" lead to resets instead of wrong program output. - Thinking about SW that is deployed in large numbers, if we admit that memory corruption issues happen in very special cases ( see 2nd pct) then the sudden appearence of a bug could _very_ easily be bundled as a fluke instead of a bug and we would probably not be able to distinguish the failure leading to death as being attributed to C. (since " it works fine on my machine" in 99.99% of the cases)