Sometimes making mistakes is a good way to learn, provided that you get feedback to help you identify them.

You can compensate for C's lack of compile time protections with run-time tools like valgrind [1] and the various sanitizers in clang [2, 3].

1: http://valgrind.org/

2: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html

3: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer.html