C Is Still a Good Choice for Small Tools

C has a reputation for being hard, and for large systems that is fair. But for a small, focused tool it has some real advantages that are easy to forget.

The binary is tiny and has no runtime to install. The language is small enough to hold in your head. And there is little between your code and what the machine actually does, which makes performance easy to reason about.

You do have to be careful with memory, and the standard library is thin. For a command line tool with a clear scope, though, that constraint keeps me honest. I have shipped several small utilities this way and rarely missed the extra machinery.