If by "close to the machine" you mean "close to the PDP-11", then sure, but the machine you're likely to write for hasn't been at all like a PDP-11 for quite some time: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
Maybe he would like to have a modern C that is actually close to the machine which exposes L1-3 caches go the programmer which he has to manage himself.