alt Hacker NewsI was only speaking for C not C++ (I fled C++ a long time ago). My code usually works first try in C, but my experience also working with students is that you need to learn to use safe patterns and strategies first. I can imagine that Rust enforces those.
You can do a lot more in C too: You can design safe interfaces based around incomplete structure types. This also should allows what you call typestate pattern (if I understand it correctly). You can build a decent option type / result type. You can have a bounds safe vector type. You can have safe string types. One can have type-safe dynamic casts. One can annotate return values so that they can't be ignored. One can use many different tools for safety. People coming from C++ often think that one can not do this in C because "it lacks abstractions", but this is not really true.
It has been a long time since I coded C. Last I did I remember hating C strings and the standard functions for dealing with them. So easy to get buffer overflows. I'd rather have the language design be so that I dont constantly have to think about not tripping over various things, instead I want to focus on the hard and interesting domain specific problems.
EDIT: Also, errno is an awful design. Forgetting to check for errors, or screw up which error you report is so easy in C. Exceptions in C++ are also bad, it is very easy to have no idea what exceptions are possible 5 layers down and end up with unhandled exceptions.