Yes, C or asm get a bad reputation. They are definitely harder.

I’m just saying that this company seems to be throwing a lot of money at the problem, and at those levels you can squeeze more performance out of them and get them reasonably right.

After all, many, many pieces of reliable software are written in C. If you wanted a “safer” modern language, you could pick Rust.

I would just assume those would be easier picks rather than optimizing around GC pauses, which can be notoriously difficult when nanosecond matter.