This happened only because Bell Labs/AT&T were forbidden to sell UNIX, hence its source code spread across the industry, with a symbolic price that made it by comparison with other OS vendors feel almost as quite cheap beer.
During the 80's and early 90's, C only mattered in universities and companies that had access to some kind of UNIX flavour.
Everywhere else we had Assembly, Modula-2, Pascal and Basic flavours, BLISS and some PL/I variants like PL/M on CP/M.
So when you happen to have UNIX, and a C compiler around, trying to bring people to use something else, it is the same as trying to replace JavaScript on the browser.
So we come up with our CoffeScript and Typescript likes for systems programming, but C (even in C++, Objective-C) is always there.
Again I'm not a C fan.. but what would pascal or basic give you that is a critical factor in making a better system with it ? modula I can't say. Asm is too coupled to the underlying cpu it's out of the window already.
Fixing C is so beyond hope that Apple, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, ARM are all driving hardware based solutions for memory tagging and pointer validation, while at the same time reducing the use cases for it across their OS stacks.
ok I admit defeat on this. I can't barely believe I forgot that u_u;
Microsoft, FreeBSD, ARM collaboration on CHERI
https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2020/10/14/security-analysis...
Oracle with ADI
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E61059/gqajs.html
Apple with pointer authentication,
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preparing...