Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C programming language

> The reason I believe C is and always will be important is that it stands in a class of its own as a mostly portable assembler language, offering similar levels of freedom.

When your computer is a PDP-11, otherwise it is a high level systems language like any other.

Less controversially, when you write C, you write for a virtual machine described by the C spec, not your actual hardware.

Your C optimizer is emulating that VM when performing symbolic execution, and the compiler backend is cross-compiling from it. It's an abstract hardware that doesn't have signed overflow, has a hidden extra bit for every byte of memory that says whether it's initialized or not, etc.

Assembly-level languages let you write your own calling conventions, arrange the stack how you want, and don't make padding bytes in structs cursed.