Maybe I'm not understanding the point of the article then. It starts out as a polemical rant against the suggestion to use safer languages, and I guess I expected it to culminate in something more profound wrt safety. I use managed memory languages so I'm sure there's stuff I'm missing.

The point of the article is that there are useful heap memory management techniques that live between the extremes of malloc and free pairs and garbage collection.

All of my formal instruction in C never mentioned this middle ground and it took both trial and error and working experience to learn about memory arenas.

Also, I’m convinced that evangelizing Rust memory safety has probably done more harm than good because to outsiders it is being made to seem like anything done in C is wrong and stupid and therefore no one should pay any attention to anything that has ever been written in C.

One of my worries before I start working in Rust is that I won’t be able to use my knowledge of resource management in C. That’s not the case at all but it takes having to filter through flame wars to figure things out!