If llvm fixes a misoptimization bug rust can start passing noalias information again and that will cause auto vectorization in many cases. That would show up in the benchmarks too. That is why FORTRAN is winning n-body without any explicit SIMD code.
Circa 2011 the maintainer of the benchmark game decided to mostly only allow one implementation of each language[0] following pypy developers trying to get program alternatives which weren't pypy-pessimal.
[0] some languages get a bye for some reason e.g. MRI and JRuby, but no pypy, and which implementation is blessed is also arbitrary e.g. javascript is v8 but lua is lua.
Back-in-the-day Joe LaFata contributed specially written-for PyPy pi-digits, spectral-norm, mandelbrot programs and they were all shown on the website side-by-side with the CPython programs.
Back-in-the-day I noticed the Python n-body program failed with PyPy, I asked about the problem and was told "we have nbody_modified in our benchmarks" and then I asked them to contribute the specially modified for PyPy program -- and it was displayed on the website within 3 hours.
I am saying this as someone who loved C for my entire life, when I was in college I did implement most of the assignments in C when prof said python is okay, but I did in C because I loved it and I thought I would learn more by doing them in C.
So no hard feeling involved.
There is no reputation to defend. You mean security problems everywhere ? do you mean old, broken, nasty build systems ? Do you mean not having single good package management ? The language (C/C++) is clearly intractable (parsing wise), it is 2017 and we don't have single good IDE for them (I don't use IDE at all, but I am sure you agree with me how much an IDE is important for newcomers)
If that is the case I think writing assembly would outperform C like shit, and with that logic asm is much better than C.
And to be honest, I am in job finding phase and preparing for jobs, if this wasn't my plan right now, I would abandoned C and C++ (even C++{11,14}) for Rust in heartbeat.
The language (Rust) clearly is awesome language, well designed, does have perfect build system (have you seen Cargo ? it is wonderful), flexible language design (you can write OS in rust -not having runtime- and you can write web app in Rust). I am stuck with C and C++ for now, but if my opinion counts , Rust is superior in every aspect to C/C++.
Even if Rust were slower a little bit (+/- 10%) I wouldn't mind. Because its ecosystem is so healthy I would trade 10% of my program performance to having something as nice as Rust.
Right. The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.
I'm biased, I want all C development halted and moved over to Rust. If C is no longer the fastest, for some definition of that, then no one should be defending it at this point.
Honestly, I want the LLVM optimized C version specifically so that this last argument for C in any context will be taken off the table. I'm sure there are some people saying, "but it's not using the same compiler backend and optimizer...", I want this to counter that.
>Right. The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.
Not really. C has lots of existing code, lots of developers who know it, and for many platforms it is the only language for which you'll find a compiler. As a language it is a trainwreck, but it does have a sizeable moat.
> The only thing C had going for it was that it was the fastest non-assembly language.
Which only happened after the widespread of UNIX clones into the industry.
Back in the 80's and early 90's, the C compilers for 8 and 16 bit home computers generated pretty crappy code, versus what humans were able to write in Assembly.
"If you're interested in something not shown on the benchmarks game website then please take the program source code and the measurement scripts and publish your own measurements."