[pdimitar]

I'd say we didn't have many options back then except for C and no more than 4-5 others. So we did the things you quoted _despite_ C's drawbacks, not because of them.

I can very easily imagine doing the same things with Rust, with small amount of exceptions (that the core team is working on even now).

And yes Rust learned from the mistakes of the languages before it. Is that a bad thing?