[tomcam]

Thanks for the link. Excellent article. Those are all great points and I like having them summarized in one place, because I am indeed a little behind in my modern architecture theory.

However it has always been acknowledged that C was by definition a sort of simplified computing model. For example, when I first learned see the 8086 architecture was popular but it was competing with many others and it was already dramatically different from the PDP-11 virtual machine you describe. The 286, 386 and so on had funky indexing modes and address space weirdness but so did just about every other processor of the time.

There is likely never to be a single unified architecture that anyone agrees on, and the developers of C understood this, certainly by the time the 1989 standard was hammered out. So compiler directives, pragmas, and maybe even language extensions were expected on a per CPU basis, no?

[vyodaiken]

That article is nonsensical. Seymour Cray and colleagues and Tomasula and colleagues invented ILP, branch prediction, etc. in the 1960s before C was thought of. The PDP11 is much more similar to modern x86s than to the weird architectures of the 1970s.

[pjmlp]

C originated as an evolution from BCPL, with B a stopgap, as means to rewrite UNIX.

Thing is, BCPL main goal was an interim solution to Bootstrap CPL, nothing more than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPL_(programming_language)

Unfortunely, UNIX's success means we got stuck with something that shouldn't be more than a portable macro assembler.