Yes, and that's the tragedy of it all...and the real reason everyone uses C. It's not that C is a well designed language appropriate for highly optimized compiling, with wonderful tooling and an elegant standard library that takes care of the difficult or insecure or repetitive tasks.
It's that I used to be able to sit down at any Unix machine in the world, shove some code into an editor, call some system libraries, get it to compile, and maybe even step through it in a debugger, and go home at the end of the day, and I could do that because that's what its designers were doing with it, so they made sure that all of it at least functioned at a good enough level to get through the day. Not always anymore, since a lot of Linux distributions no longer install the C compiler by default.
The fact that is it "not always anymore" may be a blessing in disguise. The focus of attention in the last decade or so has been all around heavier, VM-centric languages like Java or Ruby, but opportunities for new systems programming technology are coming up more often these days.
It's that I used to be able to sit down at any Unix machine in the world, shove some code into an editor, call some system libraries, get it to compile, and maybe even step through it in a debugger, and go home at the end of the day, and I could do that because that's what its designers were doing with it, so they made sure that all of it at least functioned at a good enough level to get through the day. Not always anymore, since a lot of Linux distributions no longer install the C compiler by default.