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While I'll take a bite at this, I think it's also fair to say how poorly portable C is. Can an mobile or web engineer quickly take some C code and use it in their stack somehow? I would guess not. While it's indeed an important lesson to see the speed of some of these 'close to the metal' languages, the question of how practical they are to use is a different question.

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There is a class of C code that can be made extremely portable: pure computations. This allows you to write self contained code with zero dependencies, and if you're willing to give up on SIMD you can stick to fully conforming C99.

It's not applicable for everything, but we do have some niches where it comes in handy: cryptographic libraries (I've written one), parsers and encoders of all kind, compilers…

For instance can a mobile on web engineer quickly take TweetNaCl or Monocypher and use it in their stack? Yes. They may need to write some bindings themselves, but if they can run C code at all it's fairly trivial.

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