> But, in 2026, I don't see why for native code everyone shouldn't be programming in Rust / Swift / other modern memory-safe flavor for any new production use. Zig if you want faster compile times, I guess.

Because C is very simple (unlike Rust) and works everywhere. Zig is not yet stable. Go and Swift are under the governance of tech companies.

The true appeal of C for me is the standard and how it applies only to the language. You can easily take a project from 2 decades ago and port it to a current platform. Lot of current ecosystem is way too fussy about tooling to do this.