How do you think these luxuries you were provided were given to you? If you are operating within a managed usermode level of an operating system then what you

How do you think these luxuries you were provided were given to you? If you are operating within a managed usermode level of an operating system then what you say is perfectly valid, especially for programs that do not require high availability such as web servers. You can program in a managed environment and trust in your languages JIT/GC to handle low level optimization. On embedded systems, software that requires high availability (video games for example), or kernel mode drivers and firmware, you are not always allowed that luxury. Understanding of and strong micromanagement of how memory is allocated and moved around the system becomes more and more crucial. It could be hardware limitations of the device that cause this, or in the case of firmware or drivers, any overhead that would be acceptable in a usermode application will be felt throughout the environment when you work on low-level. TLDR you and the parent post are talking about apples and oranges.