I can't recall seeing a new language challenging C in the aforementioned areas.
C has ridden for a long time on the fact that we didn't know how to combine high performance and systems functionality with high abstraction languages, so you had your choice of C or C-like and fast, or high abstraction and slow, like Python or Perl or Ruby. This gap is closing, fairly quickly now, and once it does C will start experiencing a rapid decline into a niche language, rather than the lingua franca of computing. It has advantages that have kept it going for a long time, but it has terrible disadvantages too, and once the two are separable, people are going to want to so separate.
Already a great deal of what was once automatically C or C++ has gone to some sort of bytecode (Java or .Net), even on things you would used to simply automatically assume to be "embedded", like your cell phone. The decline has already started.
Of course it won't die. Computer languages never really die. You can still get a job doing COBOL, and in fact get paid quite well. But 10 years from now, I think on the systems considered "modern" at the time, it will not be the "default" language anymore.
As for the higher level languages closing the gap, that is certainly not my experience and I've seen no benchmarks to this effect. And I'm not talking about Python or Ruby and the likes which are in an entirely different category, I'm talking about C#, Java, etc. They are still alot slower on cpu intensive code, also they certainly doesn't fulfill other important properties of C like small memory footprint.
The notion that there was some 'magic piece of the puzzle' missing which has been solved in making high level languages perform like low level languages like C comes across as nonsense to me. Higher level languages sacrifice speed for convenience and safety, depending on your demands that can often be a very wise sacrifice, in the areas where C excels it's likely often not.
Also cell-phones (which are really the upper-end of 'embedded') run a kernel and system-level code written in C doing the heavy lifting system-wise, also performance demanding applications (higher-end games) are often still written in native code on these phones.
There's certainly room for a more 'modern' C, maybe something else has replaced C in 10 years, but I don't see it being any of the languages we are discussing today, not even Rust. As it stands, I think C will remain dominant in the aforementioned domains.
Guess we are going to have to disagree, history will prove one of us right I suppose :)
Java has to some extent displaced C++ (and the .net framework has done some more of that), but I haven't seen any language that displaced C in an arena where C is strong.
For rust to make this happen they'll have to finalize the language spec, gain a decade+ experience in what the quirks are (these things only come out over time it seems), sway a generation of programmers to adopt it rather than the incumbent.
Go is shooting for the same space and it already lost the plot in several aspects (for instance: newer Go versions break older code).
I realize you're defending C, here, but I'd just like to use you for a moment to ask why this sort of thing gets stated over and over and over on HN.
C is good for low-level, systems software, embedded systems, and speed.
You know what else it's good for? Hundred and hundreds of desktop applications, userspace tools, web backends, and everything else.
It's like we keep saying it's for low level stuff, but thousands upon thousands of developers haven't got the memo. Who would dream of writing a media framework in C? The folks who do GStreamer, ffmpeg, MLT. User interfaces? Nah, it's for low-level stuff. Except, you know, GTK and Clutter. It's not for Web programming either, except maybe Apache and Nginx. You wouldn't check your email with it (mutt), or edit code with it (Vim), or make music with it (CSound, SuperCollider), or draw pictures with it (Gimp).
Maybe you're right, and that C is a bad language for all this type of stuff, but good grief -- there are a lot of developers shipping working, high-level systems in this language. And it's not like they haven't heard of Haskell or Java or Python -- or C++. In fact, we might ask when Java or Python is seriously going to challenge C in these areas.
However I believe there are lots of applications written in C because that was either the 'language d'jour' back when they were written or that the author was very proficient in it, which could be rewritten in something like Go,Java,C# or even Python and similar without any perceptable loss of performance.
Looking at things where C dominates to this day and show no sign of weakening, I see operating-system level code (kernel, driver, userland<->kernel interface code), libraries for cpu intensive workloads (audio/video codecs, compression/decompression, low level game framework components etc) and of course cpu intensive applications (encoders, archivers, graphics manipulation software for 2d/3d etc), I guess I should squeeze in version control software here aswell :)
However, there exists a wide range of applications outside of these areas where I think C isn't particularly competitive these days as it's strengths are dwarfed by it's weaknesses.
That's not to say that there is anything wrong with writing such applications in C, particularly considering aspects such as proficiency and familiarity, if you know C very well and feel very comfortable programming in it then it's less likely you'd want to switch to something else for 'convenience'.
