I would agree and would elaborate that the major weaknesses of C are a combination of build system issues and an overly weak type system. It wasn't realistic t

I would agree and would elaborate that the major weaknesses of C are a combination of build system issues and an overly weak type system. It wasn't realistic to have the whole compile process done in memory in the early 70's, and OS virtual memory wasn't realistic either; but we've long surpassed those concerns, and that means that all the thinking about the program namespace, modules, linking, pre-processing, etc. is worth re-evaluating. As well, we can do better static checking now, without including any notion of GC; in an imperative execution model, leakage of memory, handles, processes etc. remains orthogonal to type safety. C has heavily bottlenecked program control logic from the beginning - a callstack, looping constructs, etc. - and allowing some equivalents to exist in its data structures would make user code tremendously more reliable. These changes, often paired with some more attention to concurrency, show up in all the newer system language designs - D, Go, Rust, Clay, BitC, etc.