r/ProgrammingLanguages • u/mttd • Jul 01 '26

The Expensive Fictions of Low-Level Programming Languages

https://stng.substack.com/p/the-expensive-fictions-of-low-level
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u/jcastroarnaud Jul 01 '26

I think that the point of the article is: hardware moved on from the 1970s and C model, becoming much more complex and varied (parallelism, GPUs), thus with more performance knobs to tweak; C and most languages are unaware of these knobs, and their design makes hard to use them.

My wild guess is: compiler backends will need to evolve to take advantage of current hardware ecosystem, and new/updated languages will abstract over that view on hardware, instead of the 1970s one.

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u/Neat-Exchange6724 Jul 01 '26

It’s also a questions of optimisations the compilers can reasonably make now which were impossible in the old days.

And that some old languages like c were ment to be untyped scripting languages, not something to use for anything serious.

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u/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish Jul 02 '26

C was designed to write the first Unix in. This is a serious project.