Comment by pjmlp

There has been plenty of options back in the day, it was guaranteed that C and C++ would take over everything as they did during the late 1990's.

Even the Object Pascal to C++ transition at Apple was mostly caused by increased UNIX adoption, and Apple programmers wanting to offer similar experiences, thus MPW was born.

Same on other platforms, until C and C++ eventually won everywhere, at least until several new kids decided to challenge them in various fronts.

One that you seldom see nowadays, outside games, is pure GUI frameworks using C or C++.