You are conflating that it is possible for a human to reasonably fast manually "compile" C into assembly, with that being the only way to do it. Many times the

You are conflating that it is possible for a human to reasonably fast manually "compile" C into assembly, with that being the only way to do it. Many times the resulting code from modern clang/gcc is so optimized there isn't even any assembly code left to reason about. Even with -Og i many times get the famous "Optimized out" when trying to look at a variable in GDB, with -O3 even more so. You are correct though that it is a close as you are going to get compared to many other languages, mostly because they all will make use of GC, vtables and dynamics on almost every line of code which adds noise in generated output or they run behind an interpretter or JIT.