I second this, use Go. Very mature tooling, super easy to pick up if you already know C, excellent standard library, vast ecosystem, great integration with mode

I second this, use Go. Very mature tooling, super easy to pick up if you already know C, excellent standard library, vast ecosystem, great integration with modern Kubernetes/Docker environments, great libraries for OpenAPI, Open Tracing, logging, metrics - all the modern Ops goodies. You can be very productive very quickly. I'll admit to being a bit biased since I consult in the Go API/container space (see my profile) but I don't think my opinion is unique.