Even C needs more love from the embedded industry, given how many still use C89 dialects, even if the tooling might already support something better, let alone languages that attempt to replace C.
And yes, C++ would be a better option, provided that up to date C++ compilers exist at all.
Also declaring the index variable in a for loop like for(int i =0; i < 10; i++) is extremely helpful.
Those two alone are extremely beneficial.