A lot of software was written in C and C++ because they were the only option for decades. If you couldn't afford garbage collection and needed direct control of the hardware there wasn't much of a choice. Had their been "safer" alternatives, it's possible those would have been used instead.
It's only been in the last few years we've seen languages emerge that could actually replace C/C++ with projects like Rust, Zig and Odin. I'm not saying they will, or they should, but just that we actually have alternatives now.
Also I would refrain me to list all other alternatives.
I've never used libcurl and I don't know why is it useful, so let's focus on curl. Of course if you want C library, you gotta write it with C, that's kind of weird argument.
My point is, there were plenty of better options to replace C. Yet people chose to use C for their projects and continue to do so. Rust is not even good option for most projects, as it's too low level. It's a good option for Linux kernel, but for user space software? I'm not sure.
Oof. We seem to have very, very different definitions for both "Linux" and "useful". If all Linux installs w/o Perl or Python would cease to exist tomorrow, we'd probably enter a global crisis. Industrial processes failing left and right, collapse of wide swaths of internet and telecom infrastructure and god knows what else from ships to cars and smartphones.
Regarding libcurl: libcurl probably represents the vast majority of curl installations. curl the CLI tool is mostly porcelain on top of libcurl. libcurl is used in _a lot_ of places. For example, inside the PHP runtime. And god knows were else, there must be billions of installations as part of other projects. It's not a weird argument, libcurl is 95% of the raison d'être for curl. If you want a curl-like tool in Python or Perl, you gotta write it in Python or Perl. Somebody probably already did. So maybe just use one of these? Instead of demanding that curl be transformed into something which is incompatible with it's mission statement.
If you could afford garbage collection you had plenty of options.
Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point, and are already beginning to move to Rust.
So, written in C/C++? It seems to me you're trying to make a point that reality doesn't agree with but you stubbornly keep pushing it.
Not in the sense that people who are advocating writing new code in C/C++ generally mean. If someone is advocating following the same development process as Chrome does, then that's a defensible position. But if someone is advocating developing in C/C++ without any feature restrictions or additional tooling and arguing "it's fine because Chrome uses C/C++", no, it isn't.
Whatever your thoughts are about react, the JavaScript community that has been the tip of the spear for experimenting with new ways to program user interfaces. They’ve been at it for decades - ever since jQuery. The rest of the programming world are playing catchup. For example, SwiftUI.
VSCode is also a wonderful little IDE. Somehow much faster and more stable than XCode, despite being built on electron.