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It's incorrect to believe that C was the right choice even in 1996. At that time it was already obviously the wrong choice.

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It was the only choice that met the performance constraints at the time.

And the common sense at the time did not put too much focus on memory safety.

I was meeting the performance constraints of doing software in MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal.

I wasn't; back then there were a LOT of things, especially in graphics and linear algebra, that required dropping to embedded ASM to accomplish in a performant way. I think Turbo- and Object Pascal were great languages, but let's not pretend they were anywhere near the speed of C.

C machine code quality was just as slow as anything else on 16 bit computers, lets not pretend otherwise.

Modula-2 and Pascal compilers had the necessary switches to make the languages just as unsafe as C, and anything related to ultimate performance out of 8086 and 68000 required Assembly anyway.

The point of my remark here is we aren't talking about rendering text along a path or whatever. We're talking about opening a file and parsing a binary format, which is in most use cases not at all performance-sensitive.

FreeType was initially written in Pascal.

What would you have written freetype in?

Modula-2, Object Pascal.

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