That's just not an option in a lot of cases, and it's not a good option in other cases. Like it or not, C can run on more systems than anything else, and it's

That's just not an option in a lot of cases, and it's not a good option in other cases. Like it or not, C can run on more systems than anything else, and it's by far the easiest language for doing a lot of low-level things. The ease of, for example, accessing pointers, does make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you need to do that all the time it's pretty hard to justify the tradeoffs of another language. Before you say "Rust": I've used it extensively, it's a great language, and probably an ideal replacement for C in a lot of cases (such as writing a browser). But it is absolutely unacceptable for the garbage collector work I'm using C for, because I'm doing complex stuff with memory which cannot reasonably be done under the tyranny of the borrow checker. I did spend about six weeks of my life trying to translate my work into Rust and I can see a path to doing it, but you spend so much time bypassing the borrow checker that you're clearly not getting much value from it, and you're getting a massive amount of faffing that makes it very difficult to see what the code is actually doing. I know HN loves to correct people on things they know nothing about, so if you are about to Google "garbage collector in Rust" to show me that it can be done, just stop. I know it can be done, because I did it; I'm saying it's not worth it.