[dubya]

I use C as a language of last resort, as a sort of universal assembly language. If I get a problem to the point that I know exactly what I want the machine to do, but can't convince Haskell or Python or Java to do it and don't have the time to research a proper solution, I can knock something out in C that will be as fast as the machine can reasonably be expected to go. It erases all of the questions about whether the compiler is doing something mysterious to sabotage you.