There have been options since JOVIAL in 1958, as there have been OS written in high level language a decade before C came to be invented.
C has to thank its adoption by being freely available with UNIX, that AT&T was forbidden to take commercial advantage of, for many years, the only reference implementation was whatever cc does.
Yeah, pedantically speaking there were other options but not for the average person. Languages like PL/I and JOVIAL were locked away in corporate institutions behind exorbitant licensing fees. Discoverability was limited as there was no WWW and there was no concept of open source. If you were an established company, then sure you could pay IBM $20000 for PL/I and be done with it.
But if you were a founder building something new, then you were stuck with what was available and familiar, and if you went to a university in the USA after the mid 1970s and learned anything about computers then Unix and C is what you knew. It just so happens that such companies were the ones who created much of the modern computing landscape, so C came along for the ride.
But anyway,
> C has to thank its adoption by being freely available with UNIX, that AT&T was forbidden to take commercial advantage of, for many years, the only reference implementation was whatever cc does.
This is exactly my point. The path that C took to wide adoption cannot be replicated by a modern language, so any drawing parallels along the lines of "Well C didn't need a formal standard" are not useful.
It's like thinking that you can be an internationally successful superstar by greasing up your hair and playing rockabilly music just because Elvis did it in the 1950s.
The world has changed and Rust will need to play a different game than C did.
C has to thank its adoption by being freely available with UNIX, that AT&T was forbidden to take commercial advantage of, for many years, the only reference implementation was whatever cc does.