At first I didn't include the date in the title, because I don't think it matters, the author's position seems even stronger now with many popular alternative languages, fast VMs and effective JIT compilers. Anyway, C99 was, of course, already 6-7 years old in 2006.
And restricted pointers were probably available through compiler-specific language extensions way before that. You can still use them if you have legacy code that won't compile with c99.
