I am a C programmer. For me the language is a means to an end. I prefer to work on problems where both performance and code size is paramount. The kinds of problems where it makes economic sense to spend months or years of engineer time designing and implementing a solution that will compile to a 50kB binary.

I think primarily about the kind of machine code I want to generate, and pick a language that best approximates that ideal output code while still allowing the source code to be as clear as possible.

From these constraints I keep coming back to C. Zig is the most appealing contender in terms of next-gen languages.

If I could get safety without giving up anything, of course I would take it. But I am increasingly convinced that this is not generally possible.