Segfaults go brrr.

All jokes aside, it doesn’t actually take much discipline to write a small utility that stays memory safe. If you keep allocations simple, check your returns, and clean up properly, you can avoid most pitfalls. The real challenge shows up when the code grows, when inputs are hostile, or when the software has to run for years under every possible edge case. That’s where “just be careful” stops working, and why tools, fuzzing, and safer languages exist.

My assumption is a small utility becomes a big utility.

And a segfault would be worse than a panic, data corruption or out of memory access are the problems. But in reality, most C programs I use daily have never crashed in decades.