C is very "pointer heavy", and much code involves chasing linked lists and the like. This tends not to suit VLIW well.

Modern languages like Rust tend to produce more instructions for the same high-level logic, but those instructions are easier to schedule for superscalar CPUs. It typically ends up as a bit of a wash on CISC processors, but could be better than C/C++ on VLIW.

I guess we'll never know now...