What was the most dangerous programming mistake you have made in C?

Question

I am an intermediate C programmer. If you have made any coding mistake that you came to know later that it was the most hazardous / harmful to the total application please share

Answer 1

The most dangerous thing I ever did in C was trying to write code which managed my own memory. Effectively, this means the most dangerous thing I ever did in C was write C code. (I hear that you can get around it these days. Hip hip for sanity. Use those approaches whenever appropriate!)

• I don't write paging algorithms -- OS geeks do that for me.
• I don't write database caching schemes -- database geeks do that for me.
• I don't build L2 processor caches -- hardware geeks do that for me.

And I do not manage memory.

Someone else manages my memory for me -- someone who can design better than I can, and test better than I can, and code better than I can, and patch when they make critical security-compromising mistakes which only get noticed 10 years later because absolutely everyone who attempts to allocate memory fails some of the time.