You need to define low-level language carefully. As the article says, a language like assembly is indeed close to the metal, however each assembly language is t

You need to define low-level language carefully. As the article says, a language like assembly is indeed close to the metal, however each assembly language is too close to some particular metal to work on other metal. On the other hand, C is probably as close to the metal as you can get and still run on a z80, z8000, m68k, i386, i286, arm, etc. We would all love to C(!) a better common low-level language that was common across architectures but there is not one that I know of. Anyone? There is indeed a problem associated with Spectre, Meltdown, etc., but associating that with the C language seems like a misdirection.