10 keywords and you waste two of them on pub and defer?

p.s. your mother likes my fat pointer

Can you write more about the technical side? How does the transpilation work? Is it mostly naive / 1:1 or do you do any transforms on an AST? What will the language be good for when it's reasonably complete? What are you intentionally skipping?

Or, to put it another way, the description: "Tight-C is a minimal systems programming language that transpiles to C. 10 keywords, no garbage collector, no inference, no OOP — just explicit, predictable code with C-level power."

Tells me a lot about what it's not but not much about what it is.

Just to be clear, this isn't really criticism. I've had similar ideas, so I think the proposition is basically good. I just think that anyone who would use such a language would want to know its technical core. Also, another piece of unsolicited advice, you should think of a nontrivial use that no existing language can do and do it. For example, if you had a small example with a game loop that links to libtc, watches for changes to source code, and recompiles + fills in a table of function pointers for in-process hot reloading, that would be sweet and would make me seriously consider the language.

Finally, you may be interested in my C standard library replacement (https://github.com/tspader/sp). Your language would benefit from being extremely portable, using sp.h as your base gives you that by default.