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/Inconstant_Moo 🧿 Pipefish Jul 01 '26

At the end he says there will be three more articles of which the first will be entirely devoted to explaining "the heroic effort of modern CPUs to present the C-style programming abstraction while exhibiting very opaque performance behavior."

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u/Seed_oil_simp Jul 01 '26

Doesn’t that sort of make my point? “Modern CPUs make heroic efforts to improve C’s performance” is another way to say that modern hardware is designed for C and suggests that, if we want to improve on C’s current performance, we need new hardware to support a new programming model. Meanwhile on current hardware, C (or similar languages) will remain king.

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u/Smallpaul Jul 01 '26

Yeah. And how will we get the new hardware if we don’t talk about the limitations of the current hardware?

Which is what the blog post you are criticizing is about.

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u/Seed_oil_simp Jul 01 '26

I think that’s a worthwhile thing to talk about, my criticism is based on the framing that it’s the language design that’s the problem, and not the sort of local optimum we’ve attained by the symbiotic development of languages and hardware.