26 Jun
2018
26 Jun
'18
5:54 p.m.
There is a provocative article published today in the lastest issue of
Communications of the ACM:
David Chisnall
C is not a low-level language
Comm ACM 61(7) 44--48 July 2018
https://doi.org/10.1145/3209212
Because C is the implementation language of choice for a substantial
part of the UNIX world, it seems useful to announce the new article to
TUHS list members.
David Chisnall discusses the PDP-11 legacy, the design of C, and the
massive parallelism available in modern processors that is not so easy
to exploit in C, particularly, portable C. He also observes:
> ...
> A processor designed purely for speed, not for a compromise between
> speed and C support, would likely support large numbers of threads,
> have wide vector units, and have a much simpler memory model. Running
> C code on such a system would be problematic, so, given the large
> amount of legacy C code in the world, it would not likely be a
> commercial success.
> ...
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