> Still an order of magnitude easier not to shoot yourself in the foot in most higher level language.
There are some best practices that tend to help you to limit the risk a lot. Still... a lot of people do web development in JavaScript, and I'd cite it as a very strong exception to your assertion.
> Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use?
Pretty much all of the "NULL terminated" functions have a length terminated equivalent that you can (and should) use instead. There are also blob & string abstractions available that wrap arrays and strings in structs that have fields to track the size of the allocated space, with the side benefit of making C's evil type coercion a bit harder to bump into.
> Also C supports unicode fine
Particularly if you use ICU4C, C actually has the best unicode support out there (obviously there is ICU4J which gets merged into Java regularly, but often you get stuck with an old VM with an ancient version). It's actually kind of shocking how painful it is to have full unicode support with higher level languages that really ought to know better.
> and REPL can't hardly be considered a requirement for web development considering Java, .NET and PHP* don't have REPL's.
There are some best practices that tend to help you to limit the risk a lot. Still... a lot of people do web development in JavaScript, and I'd cite it as a very strong exception to your assertion.
> Pretty sure you still have to use plain arrays and strcmp, what are these "safe" libraries you were going to use?
Pretty much all of the "NULL terminated" functions have a length terminated equivalent that you can (and should) use instead. There are also blob & string abstractions available that wrap arrays and strings in structs that have fields to track the size of the allocated space, with the side benefit of making C's evil type coercion a bit harder to bump into.
> Also C supports unicode fine
Particularly if you use ICU4C, C actually has the best unicode support out there (obviously there is ICU4J which gets merged into Java regularly, but often you get stuck with an old VM with an ancient version). It's actually kind of shocking how painful it is to have full unicode support with higher level languages that really ought to know better.
> and REPL can't hardly be considered a requirement for web development considering Java, .NET and PHP* don't have REPL's.
> *Looks like PHP has some now
Not only does PHP have one, but Java has since forever (http://www.beanshell.org/), and .NET really kind of does have a few semi-reasonable options (http://www.linqpad.net/, http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/, http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl, not to mention: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb978526.aspx).
Of course, so does C (http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cint, http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling, http://www.softintegration.com/products/chstandard/, and arguably even things like https://code.google.com/p/picoc/ or http://ups.sourceforge.net/main.html can serve if you are desperate).