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by pjmlp 1712 days ago
And at what level of abstraction does ISO C work on?

"C Is Not a Low-level Language, Your computer is not a fast PDP-11."

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
1 comments
Jensson 1712 days ago
That would be a good point if you actually could write the final code for CPU's, but you can't since the CPU internals do that for you. So from an application programmers perspective machine code is as low as it gets and C maps really well to machine code so C is a low level language.
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SubjectToChange 1712 days ago
> So from an application programmers perspective machine code is as low as it gets and C maps really well to machine code so C is a low level language.

C only "maps really well" to PDP-11 style machine code. If you want SIMD, parallel algorithms, heterogeneous programming, memory hierarchies/domains, etc then ISO C is completely useless.

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pjmlp 1711 days ago
Only if that machine is a 8 or 16 bit CPU, with code compiled as -O0.

And even then, it's impossible to write something like malloc() without using either an external Assembler or language extensions.

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