C is used because it has to be used, i.e. low level environments etc. not because 'performance' most of the time. If you could pay in performance a little bit,

C is used because it has to be used, i.e. low level environments etc. not because 'performance' most of the time. If you could pay in performance a little bit, but have a clean, portable, beautiful debugger experience, nice libraries like 'Java' with a 'stable ABI' ... nobody would use C. We'd all use 'that new thing'. And we would just buy slightly faster hardware for the IoT whatever. We use C++ smart pointers all over the place, and they come with a 'cost'. We mostly 'happily pay the price' because it's worth it most scenarios. Engineers obsession with performance is a bit of a curse. Rarely do we really need that much. Kernel code, sure, IoT and remotely controlled toy cars, mostly not.