Comment by uecker
1 day ago
Compilers existing is essential and not trivial (and also usually then what other languages build on). The conformance model of C also allows you to write programs that are portable without change to different platforms. This is possible, my software runs on 20 different architectures without change. That one can then also adopt it to make use of specific features of different platforms is quite natural in my opinion.
It is essential and nontrivial, but it's also the extremely bare minimum.
You cannot write portable code without platform-specific and even environment-specific adaptations, like handling the presence of certain headers (looking at you, stdint.h and stddef.h), and let's not even start about interacting with the OS in any way.
There may be platforms that are not conforming to the C standard. But I doubt those then have comprehensive implementations of other languages either.