You make some good points. C was often used in the situation where "Hey, we just built this enormous supercomputer for LLNL, let's make this C program run as fast as possible on this one machine. Compiler team, please do everything possible to get the maximum performane out of this machine." I feel like a lot has followed from this repeating dozens of times over the past few decades. Performance has been the #1 priority, above all else, and it shows.