> Treating C like a “high level assembler” needs a rule like the cryptographic doom principle: it will inevitably lead you astray, and “astray” for C generally means memory unsafety

you are right. however, i think c does a better job at being a model of an abstract machine than rust. if we restrict semantics to that, and the developer accepts that they need more knowledge than just c, i think the semantics are simpler than rust's. in the same way, dont you think that rust can create a false sense of security to those not completely understanding what protections it provides? if we see programming languages as a hci problem, then i think c by default offers more freedom, and consequently more unsafety. amyway i dont want to come off as hating rust, i think it is a good language, but more importantly its community seems fantastic and i wish it success