Yes but it's a C++ vs C argument and I certainly wouldn't advocate C++ for anything. What would be more appropriate I think is a type-safe high-level language

Yes but it's a C++ vs C argument and I certainly wouldn't advocate C++ for anything. What would be more appropriate I think is a type-safe high-level language with garbage collection, where you can at least concatenate strings and forget about it for most of the code, save maybe the lower-levels in pure C.