As with many things, only time will tell.

Zig seems to be most prominent C alternative today, well funded, with some high-profile support, excellent engineering and both a loyal fanbase and haters.

That said, as longtime C user, I've been tempted by Jai and Zig and C3, but I am not ready to make the switch yet. The benefits are simply not big enough.

And there is something new that was not apparent in when this article was written: a lot of code is LLM written now, giving old and mainstream language an undeniable advantage. Also, Rust, with the built-in safeguards, is pretty AI assistance friendly.

As some respectable C developer I know says: the issue with the C "killers" is that the people that already know C, have years, decades and experiences they are unwilling to let go. They can jump across any major systems programming project out there and feel at home.

So to win these people you need to have a killer feature that can win them, Rust offers it. The Jai, C3, Zig, etc, do not.

Sure, they are better Cs, but that's not enough to switch.

So eventually, all those C killers will keep growing, among newer system programmers, but not much among seasoned C devs.