"I have seen these words written against C, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, C++."
So what? Those words probably had a good argument behind them, at the time.
In the MS-DOS days, compilers weren't as good as today, so handwritten ASM paid off.
> In the MS-DOS days, compilers weren't as good as today, so handwritten ASM paid off.
Just like C compilers had enough money spent into their optimizers, that eventually made them competitive against Assembly, so can C#,Go,D, <whatever language> have enough work placed into them, that eventually they will become competitive against C.
People believed they could make C competitive against Assembly, just like they believe they could make C++ competitive against C.
So it is a matter if one wants to believe and lead, or don't and follow.
There are of course languages (like Rust) that have the fundamentals to match C/C++, but then it's still a matter of adoption. C++ also still develops.
> These languages are not good choices for a game engine
I have seen these words written against C, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2, C++.
Some of the games I saw "written" in C for MS-DOS were like this all over the place:
Just as if C was a macro assembler.