Nothing added to machines since the invention of C is foreign to C. In fact, C is hardwares most favored customer. Chip designers tend to favor tuning for traces of instructions generated by C compilers. Some architectures, like RISCV, are so overtuned for C and nothing but C that they forgot to add some instructions (like add with overflow check).
The “studies” failed to consider non-C languages. These people had no clue how widespread overflow checking us and how much more widespread it’s set to become because of the security upside.
I don't think any of those are foreign to C since:
- All of them were designed with C in mind, so much so that in many cases the C implementation of those features was the first implementation of them. The first SMPs were programmed in C with C APIs. The first time I did atomics was in C. When vector APIs are introduced, they're usually exposed to C first. Etc.
- All of those features fit more elegantly into C than any other language. C runs on GPUs so naturally while most other languages don't run on GPUs at all. So, the things you list are examples of features that are more native to C than they are foreign.
