[applfanboysbgon]

C is over 50 years old, but it is still more or less the lingua franca of computing. The world benefits from having "C with some improvements from 50 years of learning". The world also benefits from having featureful languages that are a huge divergence from C, but it also just needs a language that provides a thin cross-hardware abstraction over the asm layer and some conveniences over writing raw asm. We don't need every language to be massively featureful, and we hopefully won't all have to reach for C for the rest of human civilization when we need a language that isn't massively featureful.

[pjmlp]

Those improvements were already available in languages that predated C, but were seen as programming with straightjacket from UNIX crowds.

Note that even C creators proposed changes to WG 14 (not accepted), and later on moved on with their own approaches with Alef, Limbo and finally Go.

[epolanski]

The problem with this is imho that for a C replacement it doesn't offer enough to C programmers to switch.

If you're comfortable with C you will stick with C and benefit from it being the lingua franca, and not struggle to find support or talent.

This is true both at work or OS.

As a very talented C dev told me, I can see the point or go or Rust that would solve some of my issues, Zig while being an improvement doesn't solve any of my real pain points.

[pjmlp]

Example, Zig's solution to use after free is the same kind of debug allocators that have existed for C since the last 40 years.