I understand the counterargument that 'C compiles to every architecture' and that's the key to its persistence, but hard-to-use library importing is such a high bar for new developers to learn a system. All the new talent is going to use what's easy.
edit: I should note that the ./configure && make style of building a la Autotools is not C specific. I've seen other projects written in other languages use it and building their software is just as easy as a C project.
./configure && make && make install is wonderfully simple -- iff your system already has all of the package's dependencies installed.
Otherwise you're left to manually track down ./configure && make && make install every dependency, and all of their dependencies, etc.
In reality nobody does this, and system package managers are imperfectly providing for C/C++ what language-specific, cross-platform package managers are providing for the communities of Rust, Ruby, et al. Consequently the C/C++ community is more balkanized/less integrated across platforms.
C/C++ with CMake is honestly a joy. It's really wonderful. The issue is that it's not the most popular thing to use right now. The hype train has wandered off into the realms of JS, Go, and Rust. A lot of money goes into super-convenient tooling for these newly relevant languages. So perhaps I've made it clearer as to why C is less popular now.
I wouldn't say that it's just a matter of money and popularity. C and C++ are both quite popular these days. The problem is that the tooling is so different between platforms. You want to build a shared library? Hah, the process is quite different on Windows, and there are non-trivial differences between OS X and Linux too. You need to change your header files on Windows depending on whether the library is static or dynamic, and you even need to worry about things like "who calls free()" because as soon as you make a DLL you can't be sure that the person calling your code has the same malloc that you do.
With JS, Go, and Rust, the toolchain is identical on all platforms, there are no header files, et cetera.
We've had decades to try and make C tooling nice and easy, and it simply hasn't happened, despite the language's overwhelming popularity. The most usable solution we've really come up with is writing C on your favorite Linux distro, where you can just apt-get whatever you want and pkg-config it into your build system. But once you want to build on OS X, you get to choose between the insanity of Homebrew or the insanity of building your own packages. On Windows, things are even harder, because suddenly all the shell scripts that propped up your build system stop working.
Your experience on Arch just reflects the reality of cross-platform development: it's awesome if you can avoid it. I do most of my development on a Linux system as well and I can reasonably call it a "joy" right up to the point when I need to finish the Windows and OS X ports. I don't think that you can truly experience the horrors of CMake if you stick to Linux. Heck, on Linux, you can hand-write makefiles fairly reasonably, if you know what you're doing.
C is "not popular" (that's relative) because C is verbose, practical C is ugly and just dangerous if not in expert hands. I'm not a fan of Go but Go doesn't have C memory management problems. The complexity of C development is also in the tooling, Cmake, make, autotools , autogen and co ... imagine you're a beginer today , you need to write a server . It's like 4 lines in Go then you just type Go build.
With C you'd have to install the proper library, then choose a build tool, then learn another language like make , then learn m4 macros ; then learn to do proper memory management , ... it takes way more than a day to get started, it takes months ... C lacks of a lot of modern features such as namespaces, simple string support, ... C isn't going away, Linux kernel is written in C so it will always be a dependency but explaining why C is the last choice when developing applications is pretty easy.
Try writing a JSON api in pure C backed by a NoSQL db , then try the same with Go or Rust. You might be an C expert so ask someone that is a noob in software development to do the same, from scratch and watch the amount of time it takes to do so. Now give him Go to write the exact same thing ...
I still think there's more that can be done with convention over configuration, but not every package will switch to a new convention until shown the benefit, even then...but Rome wasn't built in a day.
