>>58Kernel, fine. But do you see how much bullshit all these massive file manager, window manager, and web browser projects have to put up with? And again, they all have their Greenspun bloat of janky dynamic infrastructure cobbled together because it's impossible to write such large, dynamic programs in straightforward C. It always becomes a beyond-C abomination.
All of these projects would get a ton shorter, simpler, and yes FUCKING FASTER if they wrote it in a good fast compiled dynamic language, Common Lisp being my choice.
If you're writing a 100-line C program, or a straightforward data conversion library, sure, whatever, you won't hit too many problems. If you're writing a million-line monster that isn't the kernel & drivers, C is fucking stupid, a waste of time, and all the shit you pile on top of it to try to implement your dynamic runtime user features slow the fuck out of it.
Everything is machine code. C is just one way to get there, and is an extremely shitty way for large dynamic applications. Enough compilers and JITs generate their own byte-level machine code without going through C.