> C was hardly a performance juggernaut in the 1980's, any junior Assembly coder could easily outperform the outcome of the C compilers. I think that's not esp

> C was hardly a performance juggernaut in the 1980's, any junior Assembly coder could easily outperform the outcome of the C compilers. I think that's not especially relevant. The issue is that most other higher level programming languages had poorer performance and/or inserted undesirable mysteriously-timed lags in performance. Fortran had excellent performance, but Fortran at that time couldn't handle many constructs that C can. Some Common Lisp implementations at the time had reasonable performance, but the garbage collectors often inserted pauses (ugh!), and many were expensive at the time too. Also: The 1980s was the rise of the IBM PC-compatible (and the Macs too). These were machines whose underlying chips matched C decently well (they had hardware-implemented large stacks unlike the 6502), however, these machines were underpowered compared to what some people wanted them to do. This also had a rise in Unix servers, where C was their native tongue.