Yes, the "high performance" argument for C is a joke at this point. Modern programs are not bound by ALU heavy cycles. It's all about cache locality. C does not

Yes, the "high performance" argument for C is a joke at this point. Modern programs are not bound by ALU heavy cycles. It's all about cache locality. C does not help besides forcing you, out of lack of expressiveness, to stick to simplistic data structures without too much indirection. Where it fails is at being unable to inline well (sans spooky LTO magic) because it effectively has no type system, bottlenecking your instruction cache where C++/Rust/Java would create optimized code. If C really were made to map to hardware, it would have a better story (at the language level) for heterogenous computing, SIMD, vectorization, etc. But instead vendors had to create DSLs for these things, because of course the base language doesn't support it, because it's not low level. Being tedious and almost as unexpressive as asssembly does not make a low level language. C doesn't map to the machine and never did. Compilers and chip vendors map to C. Further reading: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479