Or is your point just "see? Rust doesn't prevent all stupid errors!".

And yes, *sshhole is a C language problem, even if you technically can achieve it in Rust just like you technically can still write memory vulnerabilities in any memory safe language if you try hard enough. The point is that any more modern language has learned that there are several behaviors where the easy way that's typically taught should be fail-safe. Enforcing error handling is one of these. Zig didn't get on the memory safety train, but it absolutely did on get to error unions. Basically every language that's trying to be a C successor in any way is doing that. Because it turns out the "standard" C error handling and the ways that posix and libraries have traditionally done just sucks and results in idiocy like this. Even languages like Java at least realized that with try/catch there needs to be some way to enforce error handling downstream (not to say there aren't other languages that don't promote that! You won't find me defending JS on this issue for instance)

Now, can you do errors better in C? Sure you can! It may be a bit more cumbersome, generate a lot more code, and be a bit of a pain in the ass to do, but you absolutely could if you wanted to. Do you know any large popular C codebase that does though? I don't. Returning NULL or errno or -1 is what's commonly done and what most learning materials about C will tell you to do. It's the UNIX convention. Using a sentinel value for errors is just what's done in C and yes, it works just fine most of the time.

But as the post says: this is the issue. C as a language, as a set of standards, as community around them, just treats all of this a skill issue, ignoring that it is possible to increase the safety by making it more convenient to write safe code, because it's not possible to magically get rid of all issues away so why should we bother at all.*