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

[Larry McVoy]

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
> 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.