It's not unheard of, but you have to be a little crazy to do this in 2026. I developed Chrysalis entirely in C (with GLFW3 and FMOD for audio): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594210/Chrysalis/

I've been working religiously for like 2 years on the jedi academy codebase which is c & c++. It's Ravensofts variant of the idtech3 engine and it's insane how fragile the games combat is to precision and timing changes, I can't get away with adding much without destroying the lightsaber combat qualities. There are certain spots where I can't even add an incrementing i++ counter lmao it presents just enough of a slowdown or shifts something around that I haven't been able to track down that bleeds into the rest of the gameplay, but I am also sticking with the ancient compilers from 22 years ago so as to preserve the fpu characteristics of the game. There are some modern attempts at using this codebase with modern tooling but they've kind of bastardized/refactored all of it and it just feels different/unbalanced wrong. idtech3 is such an incredibly foray into c it's really something else and carmack and team really sent it back in the day.

Are you working on the original codebase or the OpenJK fork?

original codebase