> In my experience, this very much maps to the problem domain (number crunching). I find that… odd. Surely we all know here that number crunching wasn't C's d

> In my experience, this very much maps to the problem domain (number crunching). I find that… odd. Surely we all know here that number crunching wasn't C's domain to begin with. It was writing an OS (UNIX) on 2 slightly different machines. But even more disturbing, are you seriously suggesting that being able to manage the freaking memory makes you closer to number crunching? Sorry for the emphasis, but I am astonished. Manual memory management (and unrestricted pointers for that matter) are about the hardware. They are about manual tweaking of implementations. They are definitely not about number crunching. And even if they were, I take one goal of number crunching is to milk every single cycle out of your CPU farm. As far as I know, C loses that match to Fortran. > If you want to do performant number crunching with most other languages, you have to not only grasp the language, but also the underlying virtual machine or compiler. This is already the case with C. It has been a few years (decades?) since C code and assembly no longer match neatly at all. GCC optimized assembly code is such a mess that I see it as hermetic magic. Heck, even the performance model of modern CPU is half magic to me. Now you are correct. I'm just saying that it applies to C as well. But there is hope. The Viewpoint Research Institute, with their STEPS project, managed to write a complete compilation suite in about two thousands lines of code. It's not optimized for runtime speed, but it does suggest that it might eventually be manageable. Here is their last report: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf > Sure, you can use fast implementations of common algorithms in a high-level language. But they are often written in C or C++. Of course. But the the OP did quite clearly talk about implementing those algorithms completely in those high-level languages. Either he was being dishonest, or your argument doesn't apply.