> Any language which wants to have a comparable feature set to C in terms of breadth of platforms and depth of penetration will run into issues like this. Maybe it can, with the benefit of half a century of hindsight, make better choices.

I've been saying a variation of this for half a decade now. My version is: the only way to do everything that c/c++ does is to be just as terrible as they are. Replacing them therefore requires a small host of languages in order to do it.

Which is what we're seeing now: D, P, Rust, Zig, Odin, Carbon, Go, C#, Java. They're all slowly chipping away from what we used to need c/c++ to do. I think we probably need one or two more (and then more maturity for several of the existing options) before the process is complete and we're left with a bunch of languages in their own niches and c/c++ in a small niche of their own.