The main issue with C is it takes some time before you are ready to take it head on. An experienced C programmers would have his repertoire of generic data structures library with time complexity guarantees (programs without hashes, expandable lists and operations on them are a pain), will know how to properly use function pointers to do that dependency injection thing other programmers are raving about, separate interface from implementation, know the build environment, know how to use structures and function pointer to build abstractions etc.

But before that, C takes much work to produce little. For someone starting programming, the learning curve is steep. Or more like, the gratification is really, really delayed. It takes some time before he can take on a real world project(it does in the high level languages as well, but the initial progress is faster).

Seeing that you are the guy(or onof the guys) behind redis which is written in C, do you have any recommendations for generic data structures and operations on them?

I personally have a trivial vector implementation which resizes when full, and a red-black tree implementation for associative arrays. Both of them work fine for my purpose - does the job, good locality of reference, generic over void*.

I have seen glib but largely neglected it because I only need a very small part of it.

What happens when you don't get a clean segfault is what got C the "dangerous" reputation.

Buffer overflows do not produce cores, they just sit there until a determined cracker makes use of them. And a dangling pointer might still access memory that looks valid both to OS and memcheck.

See also Rusty Russell's rules about "easy to use versus hard to misuse". I find C easy enough to use, but also easy to misuse.