If we are looking at the universe of Rails and Python programmers coming to C, then yeah, I think we can assume they aren't doing it for the exotic address mani

If we are looking at the universe of Rails and Python programmers coming to C, then yeah, I think we can assume they aren't doing it for the exotic address manipulation operations and their colleague's prestige ;) It's speed. It is also almost always interesting. It reveals a boundary that has been crossed, a bottleneck plugged. I think that us HLL devs always like to think we have C in our back pockets. We say, "well if performance is bad we will profile then rewrite that bit in C". Then, when faced with the reality of actually having to write something in C, well it's a different story. We think the performance increase will be dramatic, but often we are left with something that performs worse than the original HLL equivalent, and that leaks memory and frequently crashes to add insult to injury!