I suppose I've had a partial rediscovery of C this year.
It was all nice and fast until I needed to code up a binary search tree using structures and perform lookups and rebalancing...
performance tanked, and I spend quite a lot of time debugging this pointerfest.
One of the main reasons to use C nowadays is performance, and if that's the case you'll likely need datastructures.
So,I would advice against C and go with C++ (or any other C variant that has objects) in almost all cases...