Re: [TUHS] History of popularity of C

Tyler Adams <coppero1237(a)gmail.com> wrote: My take on this is that programmers who understand the underlying hardware architecture can easily intuit the code that would result from what they write in C. There are only a few late features (e.g. struct parameters, longjmp) that require complex code to be generated, or function calls to occur where no function call was written by the programmer. Whereas in C++, Pascal, Python, APL, etc, a few characters can cause the generated code to do immense amounts of unexpected work. Think of string compares, hash table types, object initializers, or arbitrary amounts of jumping through tables of pointers to different kinds of objects. Automated memory allocation. Garbage collection. This is both a blessing and a curse. In C it was quite predictable how well or badly typical sections of your code would perform. If the performance was bad, it was YOUR fault! But at least YOU could fix it, without learning to hack a compiler instead of your own application. (I once found Berkeley SPICE code doing string compares in a triply nested loop, just to look up the names of the signals. In C. Making changes to a large state machine going into a custom chip was taking the Sun hardware engineers multiple hours per change. I spent weeks finding the source code (Sun's tools group was dysfunctional; I got it from UCB). In half a day of profiling it and fixing it to cache the result of the first string lookup on each signal name, four hour rebuilds went down to under a minute. A second day of profiling and cacheing, just for fun, took it down to 10 seconds.) John