Lots of apps are better with C, not just with regards to latency sensitivity (e.g games).

E.g an app that would process a multimedia file offline (so latency is of no concern) still runs circles around most other languages if its done i C or C++.

And of course 90% or something of desktop apps are written in C/C++.

People act as all those apps, which is what we use everyday, don't exist: browsers, editors, media players, terminals, OSes, mailers, etc etc. Even web apps use those as their substrate.

AIUI the main reason for using C for multimedia processing is to have inline assembler to make the best use of SIMD; aside from that it's certainly possible to write a video transcoder in Haskell (I've seen it done, for ARM where there didn't used to be such powerful SIMD options available).

Which is not even part of the C language standard.

Any compiler for any language can have SIMD support, it is just a matter of the compiler writers bothering to provide such support.

And if the language does not support it, I don't see why developers are so afraid of touching a Macro Assembler.

Object Pascal, Ada, Modula-2,...

Sure, I don't disagree with those (and Fortran, Obj-C, up to Rust someday).

Just wanted to highlight that most desktop programs people use by the millions are in fact written in C/C++ (statistically) -- and it's not all about GC, web programming and services.

Sadly for too many user space applications that are better served with safer languages, having native compilers available, that tend to be ignored by many.