@uecker @koteisaev My point is that you can do those things in Rust and you can't in C.

The actual crash here was a NULL deref. That is one of the most classic footguns of memory-unsafe languages (not just those, also others like Java for some reason). In Rust there are no NULLs, only explicit Option<T>s, which force you consider the case of there being no value. Yes, you can still just turn it into "panic if no value" but making it an explicit decision that the programmer has to make means it's a lot less likely to happen by accident and a lot more likely to be correctly handled with error propagation, and it also means you can outright ban that choice by policy and technical means.