Comment by QuiEgo

C does not abstract differences in underlying hardware well. Systems programmers know if they have an architecture that can't handle unaligned accesses or that the address they are doing load/stores from is a mmio register. Systems programmers know the difference between a virtual address and a physical address and have debugged MPU faults or MMU table walks and page faults more times than they want to think about.

C is horrible for trying to write a portable user-mode program in 2026. There are lots of better options.

C is great for writing low-level system code where you need to optimize performance down to the last cycle. It not abstracting away the hardware is super important for some use cases. A classic example is all of the platform-specific flavors of memcpy in the Linux kernel that are C/assembly hybrids hand-optimized for the SIMD pipelines of some CPUs.

C is a tool, Rust is a tool, Java is a tool, Python is a tool. Use the right tool for the job ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.