I assumed the original example was a bit of an overkill/lazy coding just to demonstrate that regexes and other conveniences are readily available, so the language would work nicely not just for this trivial example, but for bigger things you may want to write too.
I'm fed up with C dependencies, which like Makefiles, always seem to be very easy in principle, and then kill by thousand cuts (like a regex library that defines a symbol that happens to conflict with a POSIX regex function, which I didn't even use, but it corrupted memory of a completely different dependency elsewhere).
You definitely can't manage a C program with dependencies the way you would a Rust program with Cargo. You'd ordinarily bring in a couple major deps --- OpenSSL, zlib, pcre, &c --- and then maybe vendor in the small stuff. Most large C projects don't dep in things like logging or error handling the way Rust programs all do.
This particular program needs no third party dependencies at all; in fact, I bet it'd get longer if I added them (like a glib hash table, or pcre).
I'm fed up with C dependencies, which like Makefiles, always seem to be very easy in principle, and then kill by thousand cuts (like a regex library that defines a symbol that happens to conflict with a POSIX regex function, which I didn't even use, but it corrupted memory of a completely different dependency elsewhere).