Well, the whole point is that C contains so few abstraction in the first place that most dedicated developers can have a mental model of the mapping between lan

Well, the whole point is that C contains so few abstraction in the first place that most dedicated developers can have a mental model of the mapping between language and machine. There are very few abstractions that don't correlate exactly to machine language in some known way. C is all about subroutines (functions), jumps (function calls), pointers and quantities that map directly to registers (int, long) — for the most part a fairly thin veneer on top of modern CISC/RISC machine code. For those abstractions (such as the call stack) that are essentially black boxes, there is the C ABI, which explicitly defines much of the underlying structure.