Me too! But the thing is, a vanilla C library can be used by anything. It's the lowest common denominator. I can easily call into a C library from Python, Perl,... MATLAB... and I don't know JavaScript but I bet it's not hard from there either. That can't be said about any other language.

Performance is oft cited as why systems software is written in C (or C++ with C bindings), but I think a much stronger reason is the universality. C runs on everything from big iron to the smallest microcontroller.