This is what I mean: C is absolutely not a naive abstraction over assembly. The C standard is clear on this: C is defined in terms of an abstract machine, which in turn doesn’t cleanly map to any particular machine architecture.
Treating C like a “high level assembler” needs a rule like the cryptographic doom principle: it will inevitably lead you astray, and “astray” for C generally means memory unsafety.
Treating C like a “high level assembler” needs a rule like the cryptographic doom principle: it will inevitably lead you astray, and “astray” for C generally means memory unsafety.