But C lacks even strings, lots of C bugs and vulnerabilities are related to memory management, memory ownership and string handling. Even the C subset of C++ is better than C since it at least has more explicit type conversions that forces the developer to state his or her intent. One example of the C string problem is the strcpy(buffer, char* string) that copies a string to a buffer. If an external actor discovers how to manipulate the string size, he or she can take advantage of this buffer overflow vulnerability and even execute arbitrary code remotely if it is used in a server. If the application with this problem is a file, one create a specially crafted file to take advantage of this design flaw.

However using C in the case of the original poster does not matter much as the application is game-related not subject to untrusted input.

strcpy - is a standard library issue, not language one. Most C projects creates their own "string handling" routines.

It is pity there is no alternative "standard library" with safer data struct and operations.

There are some attempts, for example, relatively wildly known klib: https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib

There are two problems here, one being complexity, the other being abstraction power. The two correlates. C is an easy language without much complexity, but with laughably little abstraction power. Text-based macros are the worst thing ever, and other than that, the language can’t even express reusable data structures, only with convention.

C++ on the other hand has good expressivity that can better deal with complexity of programs (eg. just simply having string, vector, etc) at the expense of some added language complexity. But unfortunately most of that is due to backward compatibility.

My opinion is that program complexity is inherent for anything interesting, so the C++ tradeoff is worthwhile. Also, by sticking to a good subset of C++, one can minimize the “bad” complexity of the language, imho.