I write small cross-platform applications in plain C for the same reason the author gave. I use Nuklear for the GUI; one nice thing is that it's header only, see https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear With that, I can write small apps that run macOS, iOS, Windows and Android while sharing the same C code. On macOS, iOS, and Android I use SFML to manage windows and events. Works like a charm for me and I produce lightweight apps that are fast to deploy and have no dependencies. I compile the subset I need of SFML straight into my projects.