I'm not sure if you're being facetious here, but that's absurd. It is certainly one of our lowest-level options before reaching for assembly, but it's still a high-level language that abstracts machine details from the programmer.
> In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative.
During that era, people who really needed to care about performance used assembly. The optimizations done by C compilers at that time were not nothing, but they were fairly primitive to what they do now.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious here, but that's absurd. It is certainly one of our lowest-level options before reaching for assembly, but it's still a high-level language that abstracts machine details from the programmer.
> In an era where performance mattered, and much software was written for hardware, and controlling hardware, it's hard to see an alternative.
During that era, people who really needed to care about performance used assembly. The optimizations done by C compilers at that time were not nothing, but they were fairly primitive to what they do now.