My reading of the root cause is that the Arduino IDE doesn’t provide the kind of debugging facilities that C programmers expect, like decent compiler warnings a

My reading of the root cause is that the Arduino IDE doesn’t provide the kind of debugging facilities that C programmers expect, like decent compiler warnings and support for static analysis and runtime sanitizers (at least for off-device test builds). It also does not work well with proper development tooling, in particular git. The 16 bitness would have been OK if the dev environment had been tolerable. Tho, to be fair, although Ian is an experienced C programmer (he wrote dpkg) he has very little patience for C any more, so it would not have taken much adversity to make him switch to Rust. [I know Ian personally.]