Your point is moot. C doesn't "run on raw registers". That's just common practice but has nothing to do with C per se. You can easily run it on the C#'s virtual

Your point is moot. C doesn't "run on raw registers". That's just common practice but has nothing to do with C per se. You can easily run it on the C#'s virtual machine. Furthermore, it doesn't matter whether you are running on a virtual machine or on bare metal. What matters is if you have turned on optimizations (such as hardcoding of function addresses, or even code inlining) that remove flexibility (such as hot swapping of code). Visual Studio can hot-edit C code as well. And as I stated, it is pretty easy and common practice to hot swap object code through DLLs or shared objects even on less high-tech platforms. It's easily done with function pointers (as you described) and a simple API (GetProcAddress() on Windows, dlsym() on Linux). Why shouldn't it be possible in C? Virtual Machines bring portable executables and nothing more, I think. Well, maybe a slightly nicer platform for co-existence and interoperability of multiple programming languages (but then again, there is considerable lock-in to the platform).