I came to it from embedded C, and would not call it a better C. Not that it is bad. It is just a wildly different use case.

The lack of a preprocessor alone (as ugly as that may be) rules it out for a great many embedded and cross-platform scenarios. The binaries are also fairly enormous. 10M for a shell util on a desktop may be good enough. Beneath that level, it is a deal-breaker and a scandal.

Agree with the straitjacket part though. Comparing it to something like Clojure, the best I could say for it was, "At least I don't have to deal with the JVM..."