https://ziglang.org/ is a solid future C-replacement, IMHO. There's pretty much no downsides and all upsides from a C hacker's perspective. It just hasn't reached 1.0 yet!

Zig is a nice language, but from a 10000 ft view it's not fundamentally different from C (thankfully) - at least from the CPU's point of view. Any hardware that's a good match for C is also a good match for Zig.