This is not my experience. I switched from C++ to C for all my programming. C certainly does not bring much out of the box, but with some data structures libraries ts a very good language for almost all purposes. A lot of bad press which is not really justified IMHO. There is certainly a lot of old bad C code around, but modern C written using modern tools can be quite good. For example, there is no need to do buffer management or string manipulation using open-coded pointer arithmetic, one can wrap this in safe APIs and then it is as safe as in any other language.