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Early C compilers were not optimising compilers. The hardware was very limited.

Although I would agree it was possible to design the language much better to avoid Null, most buffer overflows etc.., C was not designed to be good from PL standpoint. It was designed to write something and then evolved.

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Early C compilers were non-optimizing compilers because C is among the hardest languages to optimize, not because the hardware was limited. Frances Allen described C as a "serious regression" in language design which "destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization" because of how its semantics blocked most known optimizing transformations.

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