That "C is portable assembly language" mantra bugs me a bit. There are lots of things that are dirt simple in real assembly language but impossible to do in (st

That "C is portable assembly language" mantra bugs me a bit. There are lots of things that are dirt simple in real assembly language but impossible to do in (standard) C: tail call optimization, computed gotos, arithmetic overflow detection, SIMD, control over registers and local variable allocations, etc... If you want to make things really low level, then make a compiler that targets assembly language and then bootstrap it. Coding the first version of the compiler in assembly or C instead of something more suitable for the task is just unnecessary pain.