It's not about being "better" insomuch as being knowledgeable. My comp. architectures course had a lab where we manually implemented a buffer overflow from seemingly innocuous code, and since learning Rust, I've started writing all my C/C++ code at work to manually check for nullptrs and bounds. If I get it right, branch prediction makes it free. If I don't have it at all, well shit, I might make a critical error in production code!