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C is not a dead language to literally millions of other programmers and the billions of ongoing practical applications of it.

If your threshold for a language's alive-ness is the presence or absence of a package manager, you should reevaluate.

1. I don't think the presence of centralized package management makes or breaks a language for most people.

2. Your platform's package manager should have plenty of C packages.

I think the success of Javascript and Rust certainly tests your biases.

I can say anecdotally that the lack of a standard package manager in C and C++ kept me from exploring those languages.

I think it kind of depends on your platform. On linux apt-get (or RPM) for *-dev packages usually gets you what you need, and using something like pkg-config makes them a breeze to use in whatever build tools you have.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/

And even if one wants to use dependencies not available as a distro devel package (or as a fallback to missing distro devel package), things like meson and cmake make it relatively straightforward to use vendored dependencies.

If you're looking for a package in C you're probably using c for the wrong purpose.

No true Scotsman. I guess people using Rust for low level development are also wrong.

There's nothing wrong with using Rust for low level development.

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