You might like zig. It's still pre 1.0, but I feel like it really has that "get out of your way" feel of C with a ton of safety. If you write tests, you can get tested memory safety, too.

Zig has a LOT of good stuff going for it but one of my pet peeves is how arsey the linter gets about formatting. No tabs (They might begrudgingly fix that one), no multiline comment/string support (and before anyone tries to correct me on the strings front, you look at that syntax and tell me it isn't an intentional joke), you must use these specific line endings (That one was actually fixed in master recently iirc)

The syntax is also currently REALLY unstable. As in: The hello world has changed almost every major version. Hopefully that too will be squashed with 1.0

To be fair though, Zig is probably the lest egregious and most flexible of the modern "C killers". I can see it's really trying to innovate low level programming. I really like it's flexible malloc systems and support for dynamic linking at runtime. It's compile time code execution is excellent too. The fact that they're actually trying to support obscure platforms like the z80 is a good indicator that they're staying true to C's "code anywhere" mantra. That's why I'm mostly focusing on linting issues of all things.

Ah. If anything, the whole "rust as better than C for everything" thing is starting to hurt its reputation, regardless of veracity. People get so focused on its use in perf-critical applications they ignore its other strengths. eg I've never replaced C code with it, but we redid our whole PHP backend as a rust app, because it's great for rigidly defined business rules too.

Ah. If anything, the whole "rust as better than C for everything" thing is starting to hurt its reputation, regardless of veracity. People get so focused on its use in perf-critical applications they ignore its other strengths. eg I've never replaced C code with it, but we redid our whole PHP backend as a rust app.