> Languages like Rust and Go are just really easy to cross-compile compared to working with lower level OS-dependent APIs in C or something.

You make it seem like C has no standard library. C is really easy to cross compile: you just add a -arch flag to your compiler frontend and, provided you're staying inside POSIX (which you should!) it should "just work".

C's standard library is completely broken for text handling (depends on external locale instead of caller-specified locale) and on Windows broken for file system access if your paths contain non-ASCII. (At least until the latest dev version of Windows 10.)

Rust has the best file system abstraction for exposing Windows file paths in a way that allows you to write common file path handling application code for Windows and *nix.

For basic load/munge/save stuff (like CSV processing) the C standard library more than suffices, and is cross-platform. You don't need OS-dependent stuff (like POSIX) to do that.

(I'm not arguing C vs. Rust though... just pointing out that "cross-platform" is a much more meaningful descriptor for a CLI tool than "in Rust". The latter just reads like noise to me.)

Do you know of any libraries in C that give me an easy way to manipulate tabular data by columns, like pandas does?

There is miller. But it's a CLI tool, not s library. Maybe it comes bundled with a library?

https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

What does that have to do with "lower level OS-dependent APIs"?

Nothing, honestly. I was just looking to learn if there was a tool in C that could let me be just as productive as Pandas.