C is entirely as complicated as Rust, if your goal is to write correct software that doesn't crash all the time. It's only a syntactically simple language. Actually making anything interesting with it is _not_ simple.
But even so, I can't for the life of me write C code that's as safe as Rust. There are just too many ways to make subtle little mistakes here and there, incrementing a typed pointer by a sizeof by mistake thinking it's a uintptr_t, losing track of ownership and getting a use-after-free, messing up atomic access, mutex deadlocks oh my...
And that's with ALL warnings enabled in CLANG. It's even worse with the default warnings.
If you are writing more complicated or "interesting" programs, then I agree, C doesn't give you a good set of tools. But if all you are writing is small libraries or utility programs, C is just fine. In these cases, Rust feels like pulling out a sniper rifle to shoot a target a meter in front of your face (i.e., overkill).
If you are writing complex, large, or very mission-critical programs, then Rust is great to have as a tool as well. But we don't have to take such a black and white view to think that Rust is always the best tool for the job. Or C or Zig or whatever languages for that matter.
But the original claim was that "C code crashes all the time" which is blatantly wrong.
This is just plain not true. The fact of the matter is that if you stick to good practices, writing C code that does not crash under regular usage is not at all difficult. The problem is that writing C code that is guaranteed not to contain memory issues is extremely hard. But writing programs that don't crash "all the time" is not at all difficult.
This is why I can understand the push to use memory-safe languages to avoid memory safety issues in critical or widely-relied-upon programs. But the main reason you are using it in these cases is to avoid memory safety bugs, not to help you write programs that don't "crash all the time". And even then, the main incentive is that memory safety bugs can be quite severe bugs in areas like networking code, where they might become a significant security risk. The crashes aren't even the main concern here.
On using C from the creators of curl:
> We count about 40% of our security vulnerabilities to date to have been the direct result of us using C instead of a memory-safe language alternative. (https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/04/07/writing-c-for-curl)
And, like what I was referring to, it is even more difficult to prove the absence of memory safety issues entirely. We have only managed to actually prove it for a handful of non-trivial programs, like the seL4 microkernel.
Now, this is all an entirely different question to whether the extra work required to write your program in Rust to avoid memory safety problems is actually worthwhile. If you are writing a program with no networking code, no privilege escalation, and no confidential information, the answer is probably that it doesn't matter. If a game has a buffer overflow in some weird edge case, it doesn't really matter. If your data processing code has a problem, you can probably spot that and it probably won't lead to any security concerns. If your file system scanner runs into a memory safety issue, it probably won't negatively impact you that much.
But if your crypto library has memory safety problems, you are in for a bad time.
When a project grows in complexity, age, number of contributors, poor review culture, complex requirements, or any of 101 different things that can make a project hard, then it is hard to avoid memory safety bugs. This covers like 99% of non-trivial projects.
If your software projects are very simple, then it is easy to write simple C programs that do the job well. This is what I said before. If your project is simple, boring, and straight-forward, using C is just fine. It is complex projects where the use of C can become a problem (and complexity can sneak up on you from an unbelievable number of sources).
Probably does something cool for all that crazy though?
This is a generic method in the middle of some database DSL code that does a bunch of SQL operations on a type safe manner. Code like this takes "SELECT ?+* FROM ?+* WHERE ? ORDER BY ?+* LIMIT ? OFFSET ?", specifically the limit and offset part, and returns a type that will always map to the database column. If the query is selecting a count of how many Foo each Baz references, this will map to a paginated Foo to Baz count type.
The alternative is to manually write this stuff out in SQL, then manually cast the right types into the basic primitives, which is what a language like Zig probably does.
You'll find similar (though sometimes less type-safe) complex code in just about any ORM/DSL, whether it's written in Java or PHP.
I don't think you can accomplish this in C without some kind of recursive macro parser generating either structs or maybe function pointers on the fly. It'd be hell to make that stuff not leak or double free memory, though.