It's high time we declare C "unsafe at any speed" and cease teaching it to every student. Only those who really need it (legacy C codebase, microcontroller with a toolchain that doesn't yet support Rust) need to learn it.
Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels", "I couldn't be bothered to learn how pointers work", so flagrantly.
Rust is unspecified, lacks real battle testing, and lacks any substantial track record.
Comparisons to C are comical, and discussing Rust as being a C replacement as if it were a forgone conclusion is just... I mean I can't think of any way to phrase this that won't result in a ban - so use your imagination.
Rust is probably a fine language. A lot of y'all down the rabbit hole need a reality check though.
> Just telling on yourself, "I can't write software without training wheels"
I think both of these reactions go too far, in opposite directions. Of course the fact that C is difficult doesn't mean that we should stop teaching it. It could just as well mean the opposite, that we need to teach it better, certainly as long as it stays in widespread use. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that C is difficult even for experienced professionals, and that "not knowing how pointers work" isn't the main reason every large C and C++ codebase on earth has memory corruption vulnerabilities.
(I'm sure that's not literally true. Someone somewhere must've written a lot of perfect C code. But I think the usual posterchild for well-tested C is sqlite, and even sqlite has had memory corruption issues in the wild.)
I know enough about C to know that I can't write it safely 100% of the time, especially when you introduce things like parsing untrusted input and threading. Thinking you can do this safely, and thinking you don't make mistakes suggests you actually don't know as much about C as you think you do.
There number of subtle and unexpected things that cause UB are pretty concerning. Most of our software that we rely on day-to-day is filled with subtle bugs, many of which will eventually be exploited and used for RCE and other nasty things. I don't understand how that couldn't concern you!
To be clear I don't think we should stop teaching C or anything that extreme. I don't think it should stop being used completely either. Mostly just that we should prefer safe languages when possible and practical, or use hardening features when we do use unsafe languages, like bounds checking for example. A lot of times I think we shouldn't even prefer rust, a lot of userspace software can be written in a GC'd language without issues.
The question then becomes, why do we want more evil people in the world?. Does that make any sense? because that's exactly what you get when you don't use Rust.
Another problem recently was that compiling Rust required downloading a binary blob from Mozilla. That's a no-go for many projects.
Meanwhile Microsoft has finally acknowledged picking C for Azure Sphere was a bad idea for its overall security story, and is now adding Rust support.
But just because it's unsafe doesn't mean it should never be used.
It's unsafe in the sense that it's nearly impossible for even clever, experienced programmers to write nontrivial amounts of code in it that don't have foot-shooting behavior in some form.
No rooting, no jailbreaking, no way to break out of the dystopia they will inevitably try to create.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
Let them learn C when they need to use C. Consider it a specialist language that is only used for certain tasks, like Fortran or COBOL -- not something everybody has to know.