On Friday, 6 January 2023 at 10:29:30 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Fri, Jan 06, 2023 at 04:07:12AM +0000, areYouSureAboutThat
via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...]
btw. Linus one said, more or less, that one reason he likes C
so much, is because when he is typing it, he can visualise
what assembly will be produced (i.e. his mind is always intune
with the code the machine will actually run).
That has stopped being true for at least a decade or more. C
was designed to map well to the PDP-11's instruction set;
modern CPU's are completely different beasts with out-of-order
execution, cache hierarchy, multi-core, multi-thread per core,
expanded instruction sets, and microcode. Why do you think, for
example, that in the kernel functions and intrinsics are used
for certain CPU-specific instructions? Because nothing in C
itself corresponds to them. The closeness of C to the CPU is
only an illusion.
T
Those statements, even if spoken recently, are just a way of
maintaining PR. Elon also similarly calls C++ a bloated mess and
that all high performance code at Tesla is in C, as if that's
something to be proud of... their ultra safety critical software
project being built using a very much
unsafe-by-defualt-for-everything language...
Nvidia made a good decision to use ADA/SPARK, IMO
