This reminds me to the origin of Inkscape, as a fork from Sodipodi. The (only) Sodipodi committer didn't want too many patches, and he wanted to stay with C (no C++ code).

Some people forked Sodipodi, and created Inkscape. I can remember that one of their first tasks was to make the code compatible with a C++ compiler.

Nowadays, Inkscape is a very good tool, and I hope that Neovim has a great success too.