Re: [TUHS] Is C obsolete? (was Re: [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Larry McVoy wrote in
 <20210705144314.GV817@mcvoy.com>:
 |On Mon, Jul 05, 2021 at 02:23:36PM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
 |> Forgive me a side note, but has it not been shown for some time that
 |> apart from a very gifted few people, hand-crafted machine-code is
 |> usually slower than the best optimising compilers these days? With out

Some *BSDs moved from such to plain C code for strlen() for
example, a couple of years back, yes.

 |> of order instruction stuff, side effects (inter-core locking) cache
 |> coherency &c it isn't hard to wind up using "simpler" machine code
 |> which performs worserer.
 |
 |I dunno where my team sat on the "gifted" scale, I like to think they
 |were pretty good.  We ran our code through Intel's fancy C compiler and
 |it made less than a 1% difference vs GCC.  We cared about performance
 |and had already done the by hand work to make the critical paths go fast.

Funnily just a couple of months ago at least FreeBSD (but i think
also DragonFly BSD, a tad different) moved back, on at least
x86_64.

(I personally no longer look nor care that much, as (a) i cannot
help it anyway, (b) there are so many CPU etc. models out there.
Why try to go backward because Cyrix is so good there, use code
alignment of X for processor A and Y for processor B?  That is
just a tremendous maintenance mess, and that for free and with so
few time.  No.  Fun fact is that my one NVME disc can read/write
1.3 gigabytes per second doing "btrfs scrub", that is i think at
least four times the speed of the main memory the mentioned Cyrix
had available.)

 --End of <20210705144314.GV817@mcvoy.com>

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)