Yes, I write fairly boring applications. But the point is that C is mostly cross-platform for those boring applications, whereas the the "cross-platformness" of CSS and SQL fall apart for even the simplest of tasks.
If I write a C program, especially with the appropriate compiler warnings enabled, or some filesystem code, there is a high chance that it will work across platforms with no further coding necessary. Anecdotally, the same cannot be said for CSS or SQL.
It doesn't matter much for SQL, because I always know what database I'm using, but for CSS, it's a massive pain.
I'm guessing you can get pretty far by compiling the chunks into meshes at multiple levels of detail (2x2, 4x4, 8x8, etc.), each with the same (or similar) number of vertices.