" I’d even argue that the main reason kernel code tends to be efficient is not because it’s written in C but because it’s written with parallelism and reentrancy in mind, by people who understand those issues. A lot of code is faster not because it’s written in C but for the same reasons that it’s written in C. "
Brilliant.
I'd say that C programs are generally faster because C world has near-zero amount of mediocre and copy/paste programmers, so coders just know what they're doing.
What I meant was that you made a very bold claim without any justification. Are programmers who code in C categorically better than programmers who don't? I doubt it.
I think he missed the point on why kernel code are fast. Kernel code are fast not because it's written in C. It's fast because it doesn't do much. Most system calls into the kernel does very little; they just update some data structure and return. OS kernel is complicate because of its breadth and dependency and side effects. The call path of each call is actually fairly shallow.
Brilliant.
I'd say that C programs are generally faster because C world has near-zero amount of mediocre and copy/paste programmers, so coders just know what they're doing.