Plenty of people cycle on a fixie too. So what? C, especially modern C, does provide metaprogramming and abstraction facilities. In practice, you can even get things like the "defer" construct from other languages: https://lwn.net/Articles/934679/

The question isn't "Can I write a game in C?". Yes, of course you can, and it's not even that painful. The question is "Why would you?", and then "Why would you brag about it?"

> C++ covers my needs, but fails my wants badly. It is desperately complicated. Despite decent tooling it's easy to create insidious bugs. It is also slow to compile compared to C. It is high performance, and it offers features that C doesn't have; but features I don't want, and at a great complexity cost.

C++ is, practically speaking, a superset of C. It being "complicated"? The "insidious bugs"? It being "slow to compile"? All self-inflicted problems. The author of this article can't even fall back on the "well, my team will use all the fancy features if I let them use C++ at all!" argument pro-C-over-C++ people often lean on: he's the sole author of his projects! If he doesn't want to do template metaprogramming, he... just doesn't want to do it.

I don't read these sorts of article as technical position papers. People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves. ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore. Nah. Nobody's impressed by using it over a modern language. It really is like a fixie bicycle.

If he doesn't use C++ features then there's no point of bothering with C++ at all. C++ is kinda but not really a superset of C. There are some nice features that are lacking in C++.

The fixie example wants to make the comparison that using C instead of C++ is deliverately done just to brag about doing something in a way that is more difficult than in should be. In reality the issue is that C++ might not offer you any benefit at all and it could potentially bring you issues later on for things such as interfacing with other languages.

I personally do not see the point of using C++ if you do not use any of its features.

"Practically speaking" means nothing. Use "from my confused point of view", instead.