Well, C is never inadequate. Quite a few languages have their interpreters/jit-compilers written in C. C is portable. C will continue to be a major language and will not become some obscure legacy language. You can tell I am a fan boy, but I am a fan boy for a reason. That said, you do not seem to like C, and further you already have the program written. I think you would pitch this as your "pseudo-code" and show it to your customer. Let him or her know that you will be rewriting it and that this could take some time. If your customer is willing to wait, you now have two programs that you can benchmark to compare speed. You can compare development times in a real way, etc... quite an interesting little project once the "project" is finished.