4 ms·
>It's closer to an optimal solution if you're squeezing max performance out of old hardware with a higher-than-assembly language. That was what was happening w
by qwertyuiop924 10y ago
>It's closer to an optimal solution if you're squeezing max performance out of old hardware with a higher-than-assembly language.
That was what was happening when C got popular.
- pjmlp 10y agoDepending on the OS. On MS-DOS, there was hardly any difference between the code quality generated by the Borland C and Pascal compilers.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoBut by that time, C was already very popular.
- pjmlp 10y agoNot really. I only bothered with C in 1993, yet I started coding in 1986, used Turbo Basic, Turbo Pascal 3, 5.5 and 6.0, alongside TASM before that year. Similar experience to many other Portuguese fellow coders. We only bothered with C either at the university level or because some had access to UNIX at work. My first UNIX experience, the teacher carried a PC desktop with Xenix into class and we would take turns to use it.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoHowever, by that time, in the industry and academia, UNIX was starting to take hold, as was C. And on the PC, while UNIX hadn't yet arrived, C was rising in popularity: If you look at what systems programs, major applications, and videogames (probably the 3 most poplar applications on the PC at that point) were written in, the two most popular languages, AFAICT, were Assembler and C.
- pjmlp 10y agoC and Pascal were the Unity of MS-DOS, real games used Assembly. C's adoption for games started to increase around MS-DOS 5.0 got released, specially with Watcom C, 386 and DOS extenders. Doom was probably one of the first successful C based games. Of course on Windows 3.x commercial games were all C.
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoYes, but in was starting to grab on. In fields less obsessed with performance, like applications software, it had already taken hold: Word was written in C in 1983, and DOS itself was in C as well, IIRC.
- pjmlp 10y agoNo they weren't. MS-DOS was written in Assembly, just like Word for MS-DOS. Word got rewritten in C when it was ported to Windows. EDIT: You can see early versions here http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-... And the Lisa OS and the early versions of Mac OS were written in a mix of Assembly and Object Pascal. http://www.folklore.org/ http://www.folklore.org/ (Search for Pascal) http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_View/Entries/2010/3/20_MacPascal_and_Think_Technologies.html http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
- qwertyuiop924 10y agoAh. Sorry. Got that one wrong. My mistake... So maybe not in the early 80s, but by the 90s, when PCs had progressed beyond the point of assembler being a common language, C took off, partly due to limited resources, partly because that was what all the Big Iron folks were used to at that point.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoI also think you might need to separate the circumstances of Portugal from UNIX and C in general. Same with other countries. I'm curious how much it spread in general versus other solutions plus at organizations with enough influence to determine a victor. I think Portugal's case is the rare one here.
- pjmlp 10y agoMight be, but on those days there was hardly any usable data to validate this, so we are left with personal experience.