Comment by Nevermark

> the concepts of pointers, variable sizes and memory layout of structs all represent the machine at some level.

Exactly.

Everything in assembly is still one-to-one in terms of functional/stateful behavior to actual execution. Runtime hardware optimization (pinhole instruction decomposition and reordering, speculative branching, automated caching, etc.) give a performance boost but do not change the model. Doing so would mean it didn't work!

And C is still very close to the assembly, in terms of basic operations. Even if a compiler is able to map the same C operations to different instructions (i.e. regular, SIMD, etc.)