Because: I don't want to maintain a giant heap of buggy C Code. I don't want to deal with bugs in the JVM/JNI. I want ownership semantics expressed in code.

Because: I don't want to maintain a giant heap of buggy C Code. I don't want to deal with bugs in the JVM/JNI. I want ownership semantics expressed in code. When a C functions accepts or return a pointer who deletes it? I want code to be easily tested, automatically. Common C code has so much shared mutable state that unit tests are rare, and when used are trumpeted as masterworks of engineering like the sqllite test suite. C makes all these things hard or impossible to work with. From my perspective, the only positive it brings in the standardized ABI.