There are many reasons why we should replace C, and the primary reason it has not been done before is that the focus has

A big part of the possibilities of providing an alternative to C I believe exists today due to the maturity of LLVM. LLVM means a of the really complicated stuff of generating high performance code and targeting many platforms is solved. It makes language development accessible to a lot more people.

Sure there has always been other statically typed languages such as Ada, Modula-2 etc. However these generally did not try to cater to people’s existing skillset, or could be used easily with existing C libraries.

There has been languages such as D, but it has C level complexity which is probably not appealing to C developers. It also has initially required garbage collection which likely makes it unsuitable for many of the areas mentioned. You don’t want a garbage collector to kick in while you are trying to maintain a frame rate.

Why is C still dominating these areas? Because the alternatives until recently have not been very good. A lot of languages in the 90s such as Java, C#, VB.NET and F# seemed to have been focused primarily on creating garbage collected managed languages. Not a great solution for the examples listed above.

No Garbage collection / manual memory management. C dominates in areas where you need tight control over memory usage. In this space garbage collection is not going to cut it. That is what has prevented Go from fully replacing C.

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To replace C, a language will typically need to be suitable for the niches that C still dominate. Not all types of languages are suited for this. So the languages I have listed have a number of features in common which make the suitable to replace C:

Systems level friendly. You need to be able to manipulate bits and bytes. You need good binary operators and pointers. Lots of languages over the last decades don’t have proper pointers. Java made pointers a swear word, but Go partially brought them back.

I think one of the first real signs that there is an appetite for a modern incarnation of C and C is the rising popularity of Go and Rust. We see a lot of typical tools that was commonly written in C or C in the past now being written in Go or Rust. A plethora of command line tools e.g. are popping up, which have been written in either of these langauges. I cover some of these tools here. You see people attempt to write game engines in Rust.

Build on established knowledge and conventions. Go was really quick to pick up because despite some syntax changes, the APIs and ways of coding was very similar to a C programmer.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that they were working on Apple Silicon (ARM-based processors, similar to those that already power all of its iPhone and iPads), and that it was set to begin the 2-year process of transitioning all of its Macs to the new platform (and away from Intel). While not officially combining its mobile and desktop platforms — MacOS, iOS and iPadOS — into one, the Apple Silicon would, among other benefits, allow for mobile apps to run on the desktop platform.

Small binaries. Like C, Zig e.g. allows you to make really small binaries. If you want another language in the embedded space you cannot use a language such as Go which produce large binaries.

But if C is so bad, why has it not been replaced already? There are many reasons for that. In part it already has been replaced. Java, C#, C and many other languages already have taken over tasks previously done in C.

Both Go and Rust gave some inspiration to how C/C could be rethought and armed with this inspiration and LLVM, a little cottage industry of possible C replacements are popping up:

Let us expand on the last point. Nobody is even going to bother starting to replace the existing C infrastructure if it means you need to rewrite the whole program from scratch in one go. One thing that in my experience made it easy to transition from Objective-C to Swift was that I could in fact rewrite one single method at a time, recompile and test the program.