You may think that’s too close to the hardware, but if you want “actual control over things like register allocation”, you will be writing your code for a specific register set size, types of (vector) registers, etc, so you’ll soon be targeting a specific CPU.
Also, was C ever “portable assembly”? There may have been a brief period where that was true, but it started as a language where programmers could fairly reliably predict what assembly the compiler would generated but that wasn’t portable, and once it had become portable, users wanted optimizations, so predicting what code it would generate was a lot harder.
You may think that’s too close to the hardware, but if you want “actual control over things like register allocation”, you will be writing your code for a specific register set size, types of (vector) registers, etc, so you’ll soon be targeting a specific CPU.
Also, was C ever “portable assembly”? There may have been a brief period where that was true, but it started as a language where programmers could fairly reliably predict what assembly the compiler would generated but that wasn’t portable, and once it had become portable, users wanted optimizations, so predicting what code it would generate was a lot harder.