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raverbashing 4 days ago

> we shall not forget that all processors are C VMs

This idea is some 10yrs behind. And no, thinking that C is "closer to the processor" today is incorrect

It makes you think it is close which in some sense is even worse

▲ lelanthran 4 days ago | parent [-]

> This idea is some 10yrs behind.

Akshually[1] ...

> And no, thinking that C is "closer to the processor" today is incorrect

THIS thinking is about 5 years out of date.

Sure, this thinking you exhibit gained prominence and got endlessly repeated by every critic of C who once spent a summer doing a C project in undergrad, but it's been more than 5 years that this opinion was essentially nullified by

    Okay, If C is "not close to the process", what's closer?

Assembler? After all if everything else is "Just as close as C, but not closer", then just what kind of spectrum are you measuring on, that has a lower bound which none of the data gets close to?

You're repeating something that was fashionable years ago.

===========

[1] There's always one. Today, I am that one :-)

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steveklabnik 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Standard C doesn't have inline assembly, even though many compilers provide it as an extension. Other languages do.

> After all if everything else is "Just as close as C, but not closer", then just what kind of spectrum are you measuring on

The claim about C being "close to the machine" means different things to different people. Some people literally believe that C maps directly to the machine, when it does not. This is just a factual inaccuracy. For the people that believe that there's a spectrum, it's often implied that C is uniquely close to the machine in ways that other languages are not. The pushback here is that C is not uniquely so. "just as close, but not closer" is about that uniqueness statement, and it doesn't mean that the spectrum isn't there.

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lelanthran 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Some people literally believe that C maps directly to the machine, when it does not.

Maybe they did, 5 years (or more) ago when that essay came out. it was wrong even then, but repeating it is even more wrong.

> This is just a factual inaccuracy.

No. It's what we call A Strawman Argument, because no one in this thread claimed that C was uniquely close to the hardware.

Jumping in to destroy the argument when no one is making it is almost textbook example of strawmanning.

	▲	steveklabnik 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Claiming that a processor is a "C VM" implies that it's specifically about C.

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adgjlsfhk1 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of languages at a higher level than C are closer to the processor in that they have interfaces for more instructions that C hasn't standardized yet.

	▲	lelanthran 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Lots of languages at a higher level than C are closer to the processor in that they have interfaces for more instructions that C hasn't standardized yet. Well, you're talking about languages that don't have standards, they have a reference implementation. IOW, no language has standards for processor intrinsics; they all have implementations that support intrinsics.

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raverbashing 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Okay, If C is "not close to the process", what's closer?

LLVM IR is closer. Still higher level than Assembly

The problem is thus:

char a,b,c; c = a+b;

Could not be more different between x86 and ARM

	▲	lelanthran 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> LLVM IR is closer. Still higher level than Assembly So your reasoning for repeating the once-fashionable statement is because "an intermediate representation that no human codes in is closer than the source code"?