I think it's a sensible choice. I've seen way too many C codebases rewriting half of the STL or using clunky macro hacks (or worse, half-assed linked lists) when basically every single platform out there has a copy on the STL available which includes containers and algorithms with excellent performances and are well tested.

It's complicated but it's the only reasonable choice. You can then write your code C-style while compiling it as C++ and nobody will bat an eye.

But if that's the case couldn't there just be a library that provides all the functionality without having to switch languages? Something like boost but for plain C?

I wonder if Dlangs "betterC" would be a good fit, since you get real metaprogramming then.

Personally, I was impressed by an approach taken by the authors of Pixie (a fast 2d library like Cairo) [2]. They created a "library wrapper" generator for Nim code that supports creating libraries Python, Node, C, and Nim itself that they call Genny [3]. Haven't tried it but being able to use Nim and it's ref based gc but still export to nice API's in other languages is fantastic. Pixie's aim is to be a Cairo alternative so it makes sense they'd need this. I hope the approach takes off. Usually writing any cross language API's is a lossy operation.

Here's a sample of the API definition:

    exportObject Matrix3:
      constructor:
         matrix3
      procs:
         mul(Matrix3, Matrix3)

(edited formatting)