Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.
replyIndeed, picking C doesn't make sense when you actually want to write C++ code in C ;)
replyC++ at least rescues you from defining a million callbacks with a void* context argument that you then cast into whatever you know it actually is
replyWell, Carbon would have been better off if they just made "C with `match` and sane error handling" instead of whatever it is they are building there over at Google. But still, I think C and C++ are honestly very different languages at this point and that you can't really call C++ a superset of C at all really.
reply> Well, Carbon would have been better off if they just made "C with `match` and sane error handling" instead of whatever it is they are building there over at Google.
replyPerhaps that might be a better language in a different context, but I don't think that language would have have been better for Google given their goals (e.g., bidirectional interop with C++, incremental automated migration, memory safety, etc.)