At this point, the only thing that still keeps C close to the hardware is that they need to keep the hardware close to C model because of all the legacy code in the world. Most recent hardware innovations, like pipelining, speculative code execution, SIMD, etc are not easily expressed in C. Additionally, C was written in a time where accessing the memory was cheap and had a uniform cost - nowadays memory access times vary immensely depending on if its cached or not.