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comment by joelg236
joelg236  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Follow up to "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C"

It's probably very possible, just insanely hard to make it faster than C itself.





user-inactivated  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

why? what is it about C that makes it so fast?

joelg236  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's written at such a low level that only a radically new idea on how to compile code could make it more efficient. *well, at least noticeably more efficient.

wildptr  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Also note that giving the programmer control over memory allocation speeds up things if you're good at it.

user-inactivated  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

aren't there other languages with manual memory management?

wildptr  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Of course, but C has a big following behind it that won't go away without a fight. C won't disappear any time soon. Of course, that's just me being a pessimist.

briandmyers  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There's nothing wrong with using the right tool for the right job. C will live a long long time, because you don't need more than C to do whatever you need to do, on an embedded processor. For other work, PC and browser apps, whatever, other languages do better. Personally, I like what I've seen of python; but C is my bread and butter, because it does all I need it to do, and very well.

briandmyers  ·  4327 days ago  ·  link  ·  

C is old enough and simple enough to be, pretty much, well-defined. That helps compiler makers a lot.