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The low cost of porting a C toolchain to a new platform is a feature of C. Arguably, it's one of C's two remaining "killer apps" that keep it in use. The other is that C is the "universal recipient" language for FFI - it's easy to call C functions from almost any other language (but not vice-versa).

It's currently much more expensive to port an Ada, Rust, or even C++ toolchain to a new platform, so I'd expect C to continue to be dominant on lower-spec chips. Here's a previous comment adding a bit more technical detail to that argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822931



The universal recipient for FFI is mostly a thing in UNIX like OSes, not so much on others.


It's similarly true on Windows - not everything supports COM.


There are more OSes out there.


Fair. So maybe C only actually has 1.5 killer features left, not 2.




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