Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Ronald Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com>]

I’m not sure I buy his arguments.    First off, he argues that a true low level language requires knowledge of the “irrelevant” and then he goes and argues that with C you need such knowledge on other than a PDP-11.
His arguemnt that whowever he surveyed is ignorant of how C handles padding is equally pointless.     Further, his architecture world seems to be roughly limited to PDP-11’s and Intel x86 chips.

I’ve ported UNIX to a number of machines from the Denelcor HEP MIMD supercomputer to various micros from x86 to i860 etc…  In addition, I’ve ported high performance computer graphics applications to just about every UNIX platform aailable (my app is pretty much an OS into itself) including the x86 of various flavors, MIPS, 68000, Sparc, Stellar, Ardent, Apollo DN1000, HP9000, iTanium, Alpha, PA RISC, i860 (of various configurations), etc…   All done in C.   All done with exacting detail.   Yes, you do have to understand the underlying code being generated, and such is not as bad as he thinks.    In fact, all his arguments argue that C does fit his definition of the low level language.