My friend and former colleague has built a bunch of stuff over magic-wormhole like fowl[0], shwim[1] and so on. There is a lot of nice work on "dilated" wormhole.
There are pre-build packages for OSX, most GNU/Linux distros. I have built it on Windows using the "Microsoft C/C++ compiler for python" that Microsoft makes available for gratis download.
I have been reading it as well. For my taste, it is a bit too verbose.
I like to see something along the lines of the K&R book or the GoPL book. I was hoping that "Programming Rust" is such a book, but I was disappointed. And (may be it is just me) I like to see exercises in Programming books.
People who believe in these ideas are a minority, it seems. Every 'aptitude safe-upgrade' tells me that more and more disk space is required to install the packages.
OpenBSD project seem to be doing the right thing (as they always did, imho) by deleting a lot of code from the base and not letting it to rot.
As a programmer, one has no choice most of the time on what language a program should have been written, in my career, I have mostly been modifying and adding code than writing new code from scratch. This mostly means C, for anything close to hardware, as electrical/electronics engineers are familiar with it. Another way of saying this is that, "I program in whatever language, my team is programming in".
Embedded systems also have size limitations and the problem of bootstrapping on new hardware. C has time and again proven to be easy.
If you examine a typical GNU/Linux distro, you see all kinds of programs written in C that ought to have been written in a type safe language because most of the time, C's features were not required for the program.
I wish more and more "new" programs are written in all kinds of languages (not just Rust, but in Python or Haskell or OCaml ..) other than C and that we restrict C to the things we really need it for.
Overall, knowledge of C is only going to help. Whether you want to use it to use it for your next project is something that depends on the problem at hand.
The essence of the language has not changed. But C99 came out with a few nice things. There is also C11 which brought in a few new things as well. It would have been nice to bring the book up to C99.
"Modern C" is a good book on some of the new features.
> Why is it OK to lock down smartphones, TV devices, consoles, but not OK for PCs?
IMHO, it is not OK to lock down things you own. I have been a victim. I bought an AppleTV v2 and a planned obsolescence by Apple and Google rendered it useless (with a YouTube API version requirement).
PCs are special in that, they are general purpose devices and not appliances. If you are using it as an appliance, chances are, you are not interested in running another operating system on it.
I am posting the article "No silver bullets" again, in the wake of the npm fiasco. I think it is an essential reading for every programmer, every year!
[0] <https://github.com/meejah/fowl>
[1] <https://github.com/meejah/shwim>