I find this article insightful, but missing the points it tries to deliver.
What the article is very good at delivering is that current CPU's ISAs exports a model that doesn't exist in reality. Yes, we might call it PDP-11, although I miss that architecture dearly.
C was never meant to be a low level language. It was a way to map loosely to assembler and provide some higher level abstraction (functions, structures, unions) to write code that was more readable, and structured, than assembler. And yes, it is far from perfect. And yes, today is called a low level language with good reasons.
But this article is all about exposing the insanity that modern CPU have become, insanity that is the sacrifice to the altar of backward compatibility -- all CPU architecture that tried the path of not being compatible with older CPUs have died.
I am pretty sure that once we'll have an assembler that map closely to the microcode, or to the actual architecture of the internals of a modern, parallel, NUMA architecture, we will still need to have a C-like language that will introduce higher level features to help us ease writing of non-architecture dependent parts. And it will most probably be C.
What the article is very good at delivering is that current CPU's ISAs exports a model that doesn't exist in reality. Yes, we might call it PDP-11, although I miss that architecture dearly.
C was never meant to be a low level language. It was a way to map loosely to assembler and provide some higher level abstraction (functions, structures, unions) to write code that was more readable, and structured, than assembler. And yes, it is far from perfect. And yes, today is called a low level language with good reasons.
But this article is all about exposing the insanity that modern CPU have become, insanity that is the sacrifice to the altar of backward compatibility -- all CPU architecture that tried the path of not being compatible with older CPUs have died.
I am pretty sure that once we'll have an assembler that map closely to the microcode, or to the actual architecture of the internals of a modern, parallel, NUMA architecture, we will still need to have a C-like language that will introduce higher level features to help us ease writing of non-architecture dependent parts. And it will most probably be C.