Why does C have the best file API?
Summary
The article argues that C's memory-mapped file API lets you treat disk data as in-memory arrays, enabling on-demand access for large files and datatype-agnostic operations. It compares mmap-based access to chunked read/write/serialize patterns in higher-level languages, notes endianness and overhead caveats, and warns about the security risks of certain serialization formats like Python's pickle, while treating the filesystem as a lightweight NoSQL-like data store rather than a necessity for relational databases.