Oh that's what I was nodding at with my "I wouldn't call C a simple language" comment. You are 100% correct. I assume--maybe wrongly but I don't think so--that the natural progression of the C programmer is:

- whoa cool everything is a number! Make that light blink, wipe that SDRAM chip, whiz bang!

- What the fuck is a torn read (insert any C gotcha in here)?! Everything is garbage!

- I know, I'll encapsulate "The right way to do things" in a library/new language.

- Never mind, I've decided to build websites (insert popular tech job here) for a living, but be super grouchy about it

The corollary to "I think Rust's complexity makes it impossible to delight me" is "I think C's brittleness makes it impossible to delight me." It has notes of innocence lost, nostalgia, a "simpler time", etc. Are those days gone forever, as the Dan say? Dunno.

We're very aware and try to shield ourselves somewhat with compiler options (eg. max warning level already goes a long way), sanitizers and analyzers (thankfully availability of such tools has improved dramatically with clang's ASAN, UBSAN, TSAN and the clang static analyzer).

(and actually: yes, some rules are benign if the major compilers agree on the same non-standard behaviour, so far I have never seen unions used for type punning break in C++ for instance - it's good that C++ now offers a 'proper' alternative though).

It's pretty much an illusion that any non-trivial C or C++ program can be entirely standard compliant, it always depends on the specific compilers it has been tested with - which is still a better situation than Rust, which only has a single implementation (so far).

Small typo correction for anyone trying to search or learn more about the term: it's "provenance", not "providence".