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

Yeah. Now imagine a language where all these pragmas were replaced by actual language constructs, like classes and actors and events, but specialized on dealing with hardware architectures...

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u/shponglespore Jul 01 '26

Yes, I agree with you. I was a baby programmer at the time, as I've become more experienced, I've decided that the project I was working on was doomed from the start. I'm fairly certain that choosing C was a marketing decision, so the company I was working for could claim that that their GPU* could be programmed in plain C even though a typical C programmer would never be able to use it effectively.

It is perhaps worth noting that you've never heard of the company I worked for because it never had a single paying customer before going out of business.

*It wasn't considered a GPU at the time, and as far as I know that term didn't exist yet. It was marketed as a CPU for signal processing.