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> the UB minefield

While UB quirks exist, they are WAY off the beaten path and it takes an effort to run into them. Doubly so if you are just starting with the language.

Just treat C as a thin convenient layer over the hardware that expects you to think and act responsibly in exchange for this nearly raw access.

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In C (and C++) something as simple as forgetting to initialize a variable lands you in UB-land already, nearly every person I knew when I was learning myself (and still now) ran into these things _very quickly_.

Not to mention compilers make fun-times out of this by sometimes zeroing memory in debug and then not doing so for release builds (Hi MSVC!)..

The "thin layer over hardware" idea is a thing of the past as soon as optimizations come into the picture, and even then.

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