> A better C++ is by definition a better C

The definition is wrong, then.

I wrote C++ for most of my career. And as of late, I found myself avoiding more and more features from it. The STL is mostly trash, not worth the increase in compilation times. Templates are good for containers, but that’s about it. Inheritance and polymorphism are circumstantial enough that I’m not sure they’re worth adding to the language: in the rare cases I do need them, I can always write my v-table by hand.

The more I write C++, the more I find C is not that far from that "much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out". And I say that fully aware of the many egregious faults still present in C.

There are two features from C++ I would really miss in a big C project: generics (templates), and destructors. But then we can always write a lightweight pre-processor to add those generics and a `defer` statement. Even if it requires a full parser, C parsers are pretty easy to write.