[jt2190]

(Forgive me if I've got some technical details wrong and I'm not a C programmer, but I do feel like this is a valid question and isn't trying to tweak the noses of C programmers. C programmers please feel free to add/correct anything I'm missing.)

C has a powerful/unsafe feature in that it allows you to directly address memory and read and write data. From a high-level, there are potential problems that can happen when doing this: (1) You might overwrite data in a memory location that you were using for something else or (2) you can write data that, say, represents a string and then read it back and try to interpret it as data that represents a number.

You can easily avoid the above two problems by using a library, while still having the option to optimize the code if the need arises. Since a product like Redis needs to be very performant in both speed and memory usage, the option to optimize code can't be emphasized enough: It is a critical feature of Redis and thus C is an excellent language to use for it's development.

[javert]

* I do feel like this is a valid question*

What is your actual question?

[jt2190]

The "nested" formatting of this page has vertically separated my post from the post I was responding to. I'll edit my post and quote the question I'm aswering for clarity.

(edit: The edit link is no longer available on my other post. Here's the question I was responding to: "Perhaps using safer languages (and languages with better error reporting) would be a solution to [the kinds of problems mentioned in the article.]")