The C23 edition of Modern C

Can someone link me to an article that explains why C is basically frozen at C99 for all practical purposes? Few projects worth talking about leverage features from C11 and newer

C99 is still new! Microsoft tried to kill C by refusing to implement anything that wasn't also in C++. MSVC was 16 years late implementing C99, and implemented only the bare minimum. Their C11 implementation is only 11 years late.

I suspect that decades of C being effectively frozen have caused the userbase to self-select to people who like C exactly the way it is (was), and don't mind supporting ancient junk compilers.

Everyone who lost patience, or wanted a 21st century language, has left for C++/Rust/Zig or something else.

Most of us liking a good language just did not use MSVC. I do not think many people who appreciate C's simplicity and stability would be happy with C++ / Rust. Zig is beautiful, but still limited in many ways and I would not use it outside of fun projects.

I don't even use Windows, but I need to write portable libraries. Unfortunately, MSVC does strongly influence the baseline, and it's not my decision if I want to be interoperable with other projects.

In my experience, Windows devs don't like being told to use a different toolchain. They may have projects tied to Visual Studio, dependencies that are MSVC-only or code written for quirks of MSVC's libc/CRT, or want unique MSVC build features.

I found it hard to convince people that C isn't just C (probably because C89 has been around forever, and many serious projects still target it). I look like an asshole when I demand them to switch to whole another toolchain, instead of me adding a few #ifdefs and macro hacks for some rare nice thing in C.

Honestly, paradoxically it's been easier to tell people to build Rust code instead (it has MSVC-compatible output with almost zero setup needed).