The Curious Case of the Longevity of C
I think that during the nineties the focus switched from compiled, small runtime, unmanaged language to higher level, garbage collected, &quot;big runtime&quot; languages like Java or the scripting languages. One notable exception being C++ but its complexity and the difficulty to interface it with other languages meant that it couldn&#x27;t completely replace C.<p>So for a long time if you wanted to do low level, fast, small, reasonably portable code you simply didn&#x27;t have much of a choice.<p>Rust is the first language in a long time that I think could end up replacing C in all of its use cases but there&#x27;s still some way to go. The main difficulty I can foresee is that like C++ it&#x27;s significantly more complex than C and harder to interface with other programing languages (you end up making an unsafe C interface).<p>I think C is here to stay. The billions of lines of C code out there won&#x27;t be rewritten in a fortnight.