[fmkamchatka]

One great advantage of C (which was kind of mentioned in the article) is predictability of the generated code. Compared to a C++ compilers, a C compiler is much simpler. When you write a for loop, even doing something on a struct or some fairly "complicated" object, you have a fairly good idea of the machine code generated. It's also easier to go between the assembly code and the C code generally. In some applications like email or image processing, this can be valuable.

[derleth]

> predictability of the generated code

To some extent, I hope the code that gets generated isn't predictable in the way you mean: I want the compiler to know all of the obscure ways to make string operations go faster by using SIMD hardware, for example. I want that kind of deep low-level knowledge to be encoded into the optimization passes because I don't know it and I likely never will. Isn't that why we have optimization passes to begin with?