I have been programming in C professionally for the past ~4 years on a multi-threaded application in the ads industry and that is central to the business. C has lot of documented "foot-guns" but most of it (if not all of it) can be safeguarded against mis-use using "support structures" around the codebase like having standard code style (enforced via tools as much as possible), static code analysis (via compiler and external code scanning tools), dynamic code analysis (via Asan, Ubsan etc), having small, medium and large tests with right amount of code coverage etc. In addition to that, having a standard set of libraries (c modules for high performance data-structures/algorithms, macro based templates to work with types) and threading model goes a long way in reducing the pain to a very bare minimum. On the plus side, you enjoy a "simpler" language syntax that is easy to learn and with the above “support structures” one can become productive in no time. Plus there are newer books in the market that can teach you C properly, one I have read and recommend is "Effective C by Robert C. Seacord" - the author is one of the C standards committee members so you can't go wrong with the choice.