I stopped everything and started writing C again

I don't disagree that Rust might technically be a better option for a new project, but it's still a fairly fast moving language with an ecosystem that hasn't completely settled down. Many are increasingly turned off by the fast changing developer environments and ecosystems, and C provides you with a language and libraries that has already been around for decades and aren't likely to change much.

There are also so many programming concepts and ideas in Rust, which are all fine and useful in their own right, but they are a distraction if you don't need them. Some might say that you could just not use them, but they sneak up on you in third party libraries, code snippets, examples and suggestions from others.

Personally I find C a more cosy language, which is great for just enjoying programming for a bit.

It's difficult because I do believe there's an aesthetic appeal in doing certain one-off projects in C: compiled size, speed of compilation, the sense of accomplishment, etc. but a lot of it is just tedious grunt work.

Do `#include ` then just use `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` and never free. And add `-lgc` to linking. It's already there on most systems these days, lots of things use it.

You can add some efficiency by `GC_free()` in cases where you're really really sure, but it's entirely optional, and adds a lot of danger. Using `GC_malloc_atomic()` also adds efficiency, especially for large objects, if you know for sure there will be no pointers in that object (e.g. a string, buffer, image etc).

There are weak pointers if you need them. And you can add finalizers for those rare cases where you need to close a file or network connection or something when an object is GCd, rather than knowing programmatically when to do it.

But simply using `GC_malloc()` instead of `malloc()` gets you a long long way.

You can also build Boehm GC as a full transparent `malloc()` replacement, and replacing `operator new()` in C++ too.