3 ms·
When I was first exposed to C (perhaps in Byte Magazine), I was dead certain that Pascal would win out. I wonder if the minor optimizations achieved by programm
by analog31 4y ago
When I was first exposed to C (perhaps in Byte Magazine), I was dead certain that Pascal would win out. I wonder if the minor optimizations achieved by programming closer to bare iron on early computers led to a minor performance advantage that outweighed the need for readable / maintainable code.
- nrdvana 4y agoC did compile to more efficient code than Pascal, but The Delphi compiler processed code 10x faster than the C compiler, and hit an amazing sweet spot for the 300Mhz workstations of the day, where you could iterate through edit/compile/run in Delphi just as fast as Visual Basic, and when you were done the program ran an order of magnitude faster than VB (and maybe 90% as fast as C). Also, because the language was easier to parse, the tooling was able to interact with your code way better than Borland's same product for C++ or any of Microsoft's products, so you were getting more accurate code completion and context-sensitive help and all that. I believe that Delphi was a vastly superior product to any of its contemporaries, and was killed purely by corporate forces.
- indymike 4y agoC and Pascal were both fast, but C allowed programmers to dynamically allocate and free memory without having to deal with 255 character limits and other limitations imposed by Pascal. It also allowed us to create some magnificent bugs, too.