So what language is ready to take its place in the thousands of new chips that emerge every year, the new operating systems, and millions of programs written in see every year?
Languages that are technically capable of replacing C in all those applications include Ada, (and in certain applications, SPARK Ada), D, Zig, Rust, and the Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family. None of those language use a purely textual preprocessor like C's. They all fix many of C's other design weaknesses that were excusable in the 1970s, but really aren't today.
But Rust in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental, so perhaps things are starting to improve.