Eventually, but it wasn't first class, rather to port UNIX software into VMS.
Just like MS-DOS had plenty of C compilers to chose from, while it was actually written in Assembly, and most folks were programming in Turbo and Quick Pascal, Turbo and Quick BASIC, Clipper,...
Hardly the same kind of C for everything like on UNIX.
That a lot of software wasn't written in C on VMS is beside the point, the fact is that a totally normal K&R C was available on VMS, just the same as e.g. Pascal was available. And the C compiler was popular among people writing TCP/IP software (and I don't mean re-compiling some Unix ftp client), where they could just sit down with Steven's book and code.
On the contrary, that is indeed the point, safe languages have been a thing already before UNIX/C took off, and even the reason why Multics had a higer security score than UNIX, thanks to PL/I.
> Then we make the case to rewrite the eye candy in increasingly "safe" languages, requiring even more RAM.
Indeed, although C kind of felt second-class on VMS since the language has a lot of Unixisms embedded in the standard library and, to a lesser extent, the language itself.
Being able to define command line interfaces using cld files on VMS was really wonderful and you got things like abbreviations of options (and commands) to their shortest unique initial string was quite nice (so, for example, the directory command could be named as such but everybody just typed dir).
Very familiar with it. Ran it in production for a major gambling company in my country for years. The stability was okay (no better than say Solaris) but the ergonomics for administrators and developers was absolutely horrid.
The Alpha though? It's a shame DEC couldn't push it hard enough to prevent x86_64 from happening.
