> 2) It's fast. It's just direct memory access, direct and explicit hardware manipulation I also find C really handy for parsing binary formats (ASN1, Ms EMF..

> 2) It's fast. It's just direct memory access, direct and explicit hardware manipulation I also find C really handy for parsing binary formats (ASN1, Ms EMF...), parsing binary stuff in Python for example feels miserable. However, for manipulation string based formats (xml, json, yaml), C is quite miserable, even with the help of libs like libjson-c or libxml2. And to be fair, even for parsing binary formats, C can be quite unforgiving. I still have some traumatic souvenirs from the first time I ran American Fuzzy Lop on my EMF to SVG converter... (by the way, I love the afl logo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/AFL_Fuzz_Logo.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/AFL_Fuzz...)