Well you're not going to write asm if you want your code to be portable at all, and believe it or not C++ has a lot of features to help you not shoot yourself in the foot that C doesn't have (ex. OOP, RAII, smart pointers).

C wasn't really designed with dynamic memory management in mind. It was designed for someone who has absolute control over a machine and all the memory in it. malloc() and free() are just functions that some environments expose to user mode processes, but C was never designed to care where you got your memory or what you do with it.