It’s possible that I’m simply blind to the complexity of these tasks because I regularly do exactly these operations in C (dropping into assembly for performanc

It’s possible that I’m simply blind to the complexity of these tasks because I regularly do exactly these operations in C (dropping into assembly for performance reasons). If you do something often enough, it does start to seem straightforward. That said, there’s 30+ years worth of software written by other people in C that performs similar tasks. Much of it is horrible and ugly, but there are gems that are exceptionally clear and beautiful (more so than what I’ve seen in almost any other “mainstream” language).