This whole "Microsoft using .NET to capture open source developers" thing is really irritating at the moment. C# is nice to write in, but mostly because of the tooling. It all looks open at first glance, but things like the debugger are proprietary, and are only licensed for use with MS tools (like the MS build of VS Code with the telemetry, for example).

Oracle own Java, so that's out. There's too much hype around Rust for me to take it seriously (also, it feels to me that it's not 'finished' in any useful sense).

I'd like to be happy in C, but it is hard work. Maybe I should have another look at QuickJS. JavaScript has problems, but it's not horrible, especially modern JS with modules keeping everything out of the global namespace. So long as I ignore npm, I should be ok, except the whole "don't really want to depend on other people's code if I can avoid it thing" (and yes, gcc/glibc/Linux kernel and all that jazz, but they've got lots of people working on them in a way that QuickJS doesn't seem to).