As soon as you default to a particular policy of how to allocate, and most importantly free, memory on the heap, you have committed yourself. Low level means: n

As soon as you default to a particular policy of how to allocate, and most importantly free, memory on the heap, you have committed yourself. Low level means: no commitment in that realm, aka, do what you please. The fact that you can possibly overrule that default, does not make much of a difference, because almost any language allows this. C does not even have a standard (dynamically-sized) list concept built in, because that would amount to committing oneself to a default heap allocation/deallocation policy. All you can get is a contiguous range of bytes with some vague, default interpretation as to what it is supposed to be, through the use of malloc/free (possibly hacking it through realloc). That is why C is considered low level. Still, in a true low-level solution, you would use the sbrk system call directly. So, in a sense, C may already "add too much value" to be considered truly low level.