[foxhill]

C is no where near as low level as you can get. C-- is closer. LLVM-IR is even closer. but really, the lowest level you can get is the assembly of the architecture you're running on.

at the time of the creation, the general consensus was that C was too high level, that it abstracted away the actual workings of the code.

we've been introduced to high level languages that have made us re-evaluate what it means to be low or high level. but make no mistake, C is.. at least medium-level..!

[mgraczyk]

At the risk of being pointlessly pedantic: assembly is surely not the lowest level relevant to the topic at hand. When programming for very high performance, you usually need to consider the microarchitecture you are targeting.

[gcr]

Hmm. Most "super-high-performance" projects I've seen find they can get more bang for the buck by switching to a different microarchitecture (FPGA etc) or exploiting parallelism (buy ten computers), not so much optimizing the machine code.