[habibur]

Pointers. Nearer to the core. In assembly it's all pointers, pointers and pointers.

C having better support for pointers makes it nearer to how the processor works, compared to other languages.

[dunefox]

C is very far removed from the CPUs of the last few decades.

[jstimpfle]

It's not that far from assembly languages, the nearest you can get to CPUs in terms of software.

[dunefox]

'Nearest' is still far away in this case.

[hmfrh]

> C having better support for pointers make it near to how the processor works, compared to other languages.

Java is almost entirely pointers to heap allocations, yet I don't think anyone would argue that Java is close to how the processor works.

I also don't think that the C virtual machine is all that close to how machines actually work any more.

[anthomtb]

C has a virtual machine? Do tell more.

[hmfrh]

It appears to also be called the "abstract machine"[1].

C semantics do not work "directly on the hardware" but instead on an abstract machine that is then converted to the actual hardware.

It most often comes up when talking about undefined behavior and pointer behavior.

Some assorted reading, mostly in the context of Rust and C:

https://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

https://raphlinus.github.io/programming/rust/2018/08/17/unde...

https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2018/07/24/pointers-and-bytes.html

https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2017/06/06/MIR-semantics.html

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53100198/what-is-the-pre...

[whimsicalism]

I don't think it is fair to conflate the "abstract machine" of C with the virtual machine. There is no software virtualization at work when running C code, it is compiled directly to assembly.

[habibur]

To be fair,

Assembly once worked directly on the hardware. On modern machines it doesn't.