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Having used C (on and off) for about twenty years, including writing aerospace software in C, I strongly agree that writing safe C is possible.

Rust (which I have thus far only tinkered with) looks pretty appealing to me, though. Do you suggest using C instead of Rust? If so, why?

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If Rust solves the kinds of problems you have, then by all means use it. I don't think there exists a language that's in all aspects better than any other. For me personally, C is the language that gets in my way the least without forcing me to write ASM, and that happens to be highest on my list. If there was a language with the same idea of minimalism behind it as C, but with all the quirks and bad syntax choices out, i'd switch in a heartbeat.

Rust (which I have thus far only tinkered with) looks pretty appealing to me, though. Do you suggest using C instead of Rust? If so, why?

I'd probably suggest a higher level language if you can get away with it (portability, performance, etc), but I am not really advocating for using one language over another here.. What I am advocating is writing a thin layer of abstraction to avoid buffer overflows in the already extant code base. I suspect it would be a better choice in terms of cost/benefit than re-writing the code.

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