I guess you could replace gcc with a dumb compiler / turn off optimizations. And throw in compiler intrinsics while we're at it, after all people write hot loops with them. And pointer arithmetics actually translate nicely to all those fancy addressing modes you find on x86.

And in the other direction one could argue that those so-called "transpilers" actually compile from a higher-level language when you consider complex type-inference and static type checking. Optimizing is not all a compiler does.