EMV terminals are not under daily cybersecurity attack - you need to have physical access unless you designed your system weirdly. You probably had loads of vulnerabilities. But also depending on when you did it, all you had to process was a bar code which is also isn’t some super complicated task.

I’m not trivializing the safety of munitions. I’m attempting to highlight that safety and stability in a munitions context is very different and memory safety issues could easily exist without you realizing. My overall point is that you are silently making the argument that C programmers (or programmers in general) used to be better, which is a wild argument to be making about a culture in which fuzzing didn’t even exist as a concept. You’re also confusing memory safety with implying a crash. That simply isn’t the case - it’s more often exploitable as a security vulnerability than an immediate crash by violating assumptions made that weren’t in the happy path of those microwaves and security systems. That millions of devices were and still are routinely exploitable.

You’re also making a fallacious line of reasoning that the C today is the same C that was in use in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. It’s not and has gotten harder and more dangerous because a) multi threading became more of a thing and b) compiler authors started exploiting “undefined” behaviors for extra optimization.

It’s just wild for me to encounter someone who believes C is a safe language and is suitable to connect to I/O too when there’s so many anecdotal and wide statistical evidence gathered that that’s not the case. Even SQLite, the darling of the C community, is not safe if asked to open arbitrary SQLite files - there’s various security attacks known and possible.