This is scary. I love and hate C, been using it almost 40 years. Its use seems more and more like juggling razor blades, wishing not to get cut but still always wondering when it will happen next.
Rust, Pony, Crystal, Go, Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Clojure have their merits to address most of C's shortcomings, offer much higher levels of abstraction (productivity) and provide these features that didn't yet exist when C grew up. Languages were mostly built bottom-up.
But really, C is often used as a portable-ish lingua franca, along with similar but different: JVM bytecode and LLVM IR, for writing nearer to bare metal (native assembly or runtime).
Rust, Pony, Crystal, Go, Elixir, Haskell, OCaml, Lisp, Clojure have their merits to address most of C's shortcomings, offer much higher levels of abstraction (productivity) and provide these features that didn't yet exist when C grew up. Languages were mostly built bottom-up.
But really, C is often used as a portable-ish lingua franca, along with similar but different: JVM bytecode and LLVM IR, for writing nearer to bare metal (native assembly or runtime).