4 ms·

> Algol, PL/I, PL/M and many others already existed and pre-dated the computers used to develop C on. True... and I bet the performance was significally slowe

• pjmlp 11y ago
  > True... and I bet the performance was significally slower. Obvious, since those systems pre-dated PDP-11 hardware. > Also I think the portability in those languages was also limited. Have you ever coded C before ANSI C was approved? It was only portable to UNIX itself, just like those other OSes and their systems programming languages. Each C compiler outside UNIX implemented its own subset and semantics, hence why ANSI C had to adopt so much UB to avoid breaking too much code.
  • pmelendez 11y ago
    > Obvious, since those systems pre-dated PDP-11 hardware. Well, I was actually referring to the equivalent running on PDP-11 (like Algol68) > Have you ever coded C before ANSI C was approved? >It was only portable to UNIX itself, just like those other OSes and their systems programming languages. I meant machine portability. Before C, to have a lower level like performance you needed to use machine-specific assembly.
    • pjmlp 11y ago
      C compilers generated so bad code that games only started using it in home computers instead of Assembly during the mid-90's. On workstations and mainframes there was hardly any difference to other heigher level system programming languages. In fact C prevented many compiler optimizations due to its aliasing and decay of arrays into pointers.
      • moomin 11y ago
        Amazing how few people remember that Fortran compilers always outperformed C compilers in the "bad old days".