Chez Scheme used to run on 8-bit platform, too. Then there's Pascal and BASIC dialects for microcontrollers. Astrobe has Oberon dialect for ARM Cortex's. AVR-Ada lets you use Ada with AVR's. OcaPIC put Ocaml subset on PIC microcontrollers.
People are using C because most people already use C with the ecosystem benefits that follow. Although C and assembly are dominant, there are other options available if people think their pro's and con's line up with their needs.
That's excellent news. ATS is one of the best languages out there. It used to beat C in the shootout benchmarks, and adds much better security and types than C/C++.
I'll try to use in my next embedded job, where they do just C.
http://metasepi.org/doc/metasepi-icfp2015-arduino-ats.pdf
http://www.ats-lang.org
Chez Scheme used to run on 8-bit platform, too. Then there's Pascal and BASIC dialects for microcontrollers. Astrobe has Oberon dialect for ARM Cortex's. AVR-Ada lets you use Ada with AVR's. OcaPIC put Ocaml subset on PIC microcontrollers.
People are using C because most people already use C with the ecosystem benefits that follow. Although C and assembly are dominant, there are other options available if people think their pro's and con's line up with their needs.