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

[Cornelius Keck <ckeck@texoma.net>]

Now, that sounds interesting.. only hiccup is that I'm getting a "DOI 
Not Found" for 10.1145/3209212. Could it be that the write-up is going 
to take some time for the general public to see it?

Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> There is a provocative article published today in the lastest issue of
> Communications of the ACM:
>
> 	David Chisnall
> 	C is not a low-level language
> 	Comm ACM 61(7) 44--48 July 2018
> 	https://doi.org/10.1145/3209212
>
> Because C is the implementation language of choice for a substantial
> part of the UNIX world, it seems useful to announce the new article to
> TUHS list members.
>
> David Chisnall discusses the PDP-11 legacy, the design of C, and the
> massive parallelism available in modern processors that is not so easy
> to exploit in C, particularly, portable C.  He also observes:
>
>>> ...
>>> A processor designed purely for speed, not for a compromise between
>>> speed and C support, would likely support large numbers of threads,
>>> have wide vector units, and have a much simpler memory model. Running
>>> C code on such a system would be problematic, so, given the large
>>> amount of legacy C code in the world, it would not likely be a
>>> commercial success.
>>> ...
>
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