writing optimizers in C is much harder than in Fortran because of reduced abstractions and reasoning about memory and pointers. in Fortran they were working on

writing optimizers in C is much harder than in Fortran because of reduced abstractions and reasoning about memory and pointers. in Fortran they were working on making automatic multi-threaded optimizations where you would write Fortran and it would auto-parallelize into multiple threads ... before C was invented. C did kill a lot of work on making computers easier to program and safer. it was a devils bargain for speed and we paid for it with decades of crappy code with buffer overflows and shared state race conditions. it's tricky to know if it was worth it.