[Matthias247]

> I think the appeal of C is that you are able to write the fastest implementation any given algorithm, something that just isn't possible in most other languages.

Maybe you can, but lots of the C code I've seen in the last years was pretty inefficient compared to what one would have gotten from a reasonable C++ or Rust implementation:

Examples are inefficient strlen() operations due to the default "string" type, unnecessary copies and allocations of things like strings due to ambiguous ownership, unnecessary null checks to quiet down static analyzers in the absence of non-null references, and extra indirections or allocations in order to work-around missing compile-time generics (besides macros), etc.