[mhh__]

C - and especially idiomatic C actually withholds a __lot__ of information from the compiler. People like to think C is just a portable assembler, but by god it ain't.

The reason why C programs often are fast or run faster is because the language forces you to approach almost all abstraction head on - this goes both ways however, in that linked lists are much faster to write in C than a safe array type, so programs can end up with bad data structures for too long.

Since the lingua franca of the operating system is still C or C-like, there are actual optimization opportunities that go missing because of the C interface: It's hard to devise many alternatives, but if you are calling into libc for mathematics in a hot loop it may be worth avoiding it and rolling your own since the compiler can't really inline libc calls.

[coldtea]

>C - and especially idiomatic C actually withholds a __lot__ of information from the compiler. People like to think C is just a portable assembler, but by god it ain't.

Well it might not be, but the fact that it "withholds a lot of information from the compiler" is an argument in favor of it being (a portable assembler), not the opposite.