> In C, Zig, Rust, C++ (hardish) I can sit down with pen and paper and map out the layout of memory and take informed decisions on cache locality, access patter

> In C, Zig, Rust, C++ (hardish) I can sit down with pen and paper and map out the layout of memory and take informed decisions on cache locality, access patterns, etc s/informed decisions/educated guess at most Even a seemingly low-level C code can be transformed to such a random code by the compiler that every intuition you have is thrown out the window. Hell, even assembly can be very misleading, even expert compiler writers have to fall back to micro-benchmarks, as it can be very misleading - the longer code might just be faster.