Plenty of languages far better suited for most use cases, yes we have that. But to replace C, there are not that much candidates. I don’t mean Rust is such a candidate.
Maybe Zig is currently the closest thing to such a candidate, but it doesn’t even pretend to aim at this, andalign with the "C ABI as interoperation modus for foreign function interface" policy, like the rest[1] of programming languages.
From 1958 up to the mid-1980's many OSes were written in something else other than C, and in the 15 years that preceded it there were approaches beyond pure Assembly.
Granted it is a matter for the market to be willing to move beyond it, and the OSes written in it, but the matter isn't technical per se, rather economical, political, human behaviours,...
Yes, we totally agree that this is not a purely technical issue. This is not completely unrelated, inertia here is also fed by technical considerations.
Maybe Zig is currently the closest thing to such a candidate, but it doesn’t even pretend to aim at this, andalign with the "C ABI as interoperation modus for foreign function interface" policy, like the rest[1] of programming languages.
[1] https://ziglearn.org/chapter-4/