For half a century there have been compilers that generated highly optimized code for, e.g, FORTRAN. The problem with C is not the way the compiler optimizes, but rather the semantic repertoire.
________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Assembler List <[email protected]> on behalf of Chris Craddock <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2023 11:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: looking for limbo languages - how low can you go? Hi Jon, "It's silly to say that C hardware near. I would say less than 5% of the x86 or z instructions are used by the language." I just delivered a brand new z/OS automation product that's about 40% HLASM and 60% C++. Yes really, it's IBM's C++ running APF authorized under LE in a z/OS STC. The old me would have been horrified, but times change. It would have been untenable to write the whole thing in HLASM. You would be shocked if you looked at a z/OS C++ listing. Spoiler: the C/C++ compiler and libraries exploit the living shit out of the z architecture instruction set. There are waaaay more new instructions in the generated C++ than in the HLASM part (I wrote both parts). It is true that the C/C++ macro processor is pretty dumb compared to the HLASM macro language. And yet that doesn't seem to be much of a limitation if any. The programming models are just different. CC
