Of course there is C specific hardware! X86 provided efficient call/return protocol instructions including display management, specifically targeting Pascal/Mo

Of course there is C specific hardware! X86 provided efficient call/return protocol instructions including display management, specifically targeting Pascal/Modula style languages. Microsoft Windows 3.1 even mandated this calling protocol. However old style C didn't use this API because it doesn't work with varargs and C doesn't have nested functions. Instead Intel observed real code and optimised their instruction set to speed it up, locking everyone into lame languages like C. Attempts by Intel to break from this, for example with x64, have failed (x64 has two stacks). Similarly segmented architectures, which implement extension of the Harvard machine model, have been largely unsupported in favour of linear addressing von Neumann machines, primarily because that's what C and Unix use. Interesting to see Microsoft adapt their OS designs based on this trend. To support more advanced features in a language often requires only a few very low level primitives. This is why Linux kernel doesn't need much assembler, to do things like stack swapping. Control exchange is one of those things completely missing from C.