I've been writing C on and off since 1990, across embedded systems, game consoles, massive SGI supercomputers, and modern kernels. C is not fading away because

I've been writing C on and off since 1990, across embedded systems, game consoles, massive SGI supercomputers, and modern kernels. C is not fading away because of it's portability and low overhead. It has some nasty behaviors, as the original post shows, but you hit those once in a blue moon. The language is not unsound because of it, it just has some warts like any other language. I don't particularly enjoy writing C, as it's too low level for my liking and I have to write too much code to do basic things (slist_* makes me shudder), but the reason that I have used it is due to its tremendous portability and direct compilation to machine code. That still matters in some places. In places where memory is precious, or realtime performance precludes things like memory managers, C will continue to thrive, beside languages like Rust which are great for different goals. There's room for both. C, in my opinion, has stood the test of time on its simplicity, portability, and the ubiquity of the C standard library, tiny as it may be.