While true, its lack of restrictions is also a hinderance in terms of performance. As pointers can overlap by default (unless you throw a __restrict on them), a whole class of optimizations cannot be performed. That's why Fortran and Rust can in theory beat C from a performance perspective even though they do more checking as a rule. That's just one example, but it's a pretty big one.
"We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine."
