I can relate a lot to this as an old school C++ developer (not anymore). I also remember switching a project over to pure C some years ago and found it a lot mo

I can relate a lot to this as an old school C++ developer (not anymore). I also remember switching a project over to pure C some years ago and found it a lot more pleasant to work with. But I combined it with Lua so I could use Lua for high level constructs C is not so good at. Anyway I suspect that in a few years Zig will be the choice in scenarios like this. It gives you fast compilation times and low level access like C while being a lot safer, but without adding C++ level complexity. That is an important sweet spot to hit.