[simias]

Lack of generics will do that, unless you consider that blindly casting `void ` all over the place counts as "well-encapsulated". Even with macro-soup designing a good agnostic dictionary implementation for C is rather challenging. Linked lists are okay* if you use something like the kernel's list.h, but even then it's macro-heavy and has its pitfalls.

In my work as an embedded developer I still use C a lot and it's probably the programming language I know best and have the most experience with but it would never cross my mind to write a PDF interpreter in it unless I had a tremendous reason to do so. There are so many better choices these days.

[tgflynn]

Type safety and encapsulation are distinct issues. The Linux kernel uses many well-encapsulated interfaces but it's written in C and the typing reflects that limitation.

Personally I haven't used straight C in years and would never choose it over C++ unless platform constraints required it, but a vast amount of very complex software has been and continues to be written in C, including all the widely used OS kernels, so I don't find it very surprising that a new feature in a very old piece of software would be written in it.

[aforwardslash]

Except when you need to build from source; you'll need yet another whole compiler toolchain that may or may not behave well on a specific environment - eg, do you kow how well rust (or other "modern" language) works in late-nineties mips systems? The c compiler is the lowest common denominator.