I don't see your point. There's tons of stuff in C11 for example that is not applicable to a vast majority of where C is used. Even in C99 basic stuff as 'float

I don't see your point. There's tons of stuff in C11 for example that is not applicable to a vast majority of where C is used. Even in C99 basic stuff as 'floating point' or 'malloc' is not available on many hardware, that doesn't stop having a standard way of using them /when applicable/. I know there are traps to fall into -- when I see people writing floating point code on an 8 bit AVR, I cringe, but well, 'it works'. As far as changing language, you just answered your own question by mentioning 4 of the myriad of them that aren't ported on as many platform as C, requires runtime of unknown quality, and also requires a body of developers that... doesn't exist. I've had a long enough time in the industry to have seen quite a few times a whole bunch of software done by someone who was following the fancy trendy language of the day, and required a complete rewrite in... C to be able to move on from it. Heck, I've done similarly as well, done 20+ years of C++, gradually trying to scope down the subset of what I was using to then realize I just might be better of with plain C -- and magic happened -- stuff still compile/work years after they were made... And anyone/everyone can just dive in and use the codebase.