I think it's partly that if you're not looking for speed improvements then C, as a language, begins to look less attractive. There are certainly safer alternat

I think it's partly that if you're not looking for speed improvements then C, as a language, begins to look less attractive. There are certainly safer alternatives, but not faster ones. I'd probably agree though, in most cases users don't need the fastest builds (most OS tools). It would be interesting actually to be able to enabled optimized versions of functions as a runtime flag. But I've never seen that done.