[pornel]

Unless you really really need obscure platforms, just forget about it. Make the jump, don't look back.

After you get a taste of a modern toolchain (with cross-compilation, dependency management, but withou not-quite-portable build files to endlessly fiddle with, without outdated compilers to work around), you will not want to have to compile a C file again.

Languages like Zig and Rust are easy to install. Mostly it's just a tarball, so it's less of an inconvenience than getting the right version of autotools.

[keithnz]

its not obscure platforms, its a ton of embedded platforms (you may consider that obscure, but reality is there are millions and millions of devices out there running software on these "obscure" platforms), most of them don't have many options. At one stage I was writing write my own language to compile to C based around state machines and actors as so many devices tend to be some version (often badly implemented) of those two things. But I ended up moving out of the embedded world and kind of lost my prime motivation for doing it.