It feels a bit unfair to lay the blame for all of this on C. All other mainstream compilable languages compile to similar abstract machines in a similar fashion to C.
Low-level, high-level… such categorization is arbitrary semantics. An old and arbitrary IT meme, like vim vs emacs.<p>No useful outcomes are achieved through the debate. We learn nothing about a previously unknown capability of our technology or self structuring pointless taxonomy.<p>“Oh look a grammatically correct sentence.” is all this rises to.
Our computers though more powerful don't seem to work any better than they did before in my user experience of 30 years: stalls, hang ups, crashes and pop up windows telling me to do something...
Why do we trust this consumer level technology to do mission critical work: running our lives or ruining it?
Low level means simple translation to assembly, not the gigabytes it takes to make a compiler or the crazy implementations, I wonder why Randal Hyde's HLA is not popular or maintained by the community.
If you want to see the previous threads, you have to remove "PDP-11" from the search query: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=C%20Is%20Not%20a%20Low-level%20Language%202018&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>Clicking the "past" link by itself won't find them.
This is partly fighting a strawman. No performance aware programmer worth their salt assumes a fast PDP-11. C is still loved because it provides control over memory layout and memory management, maybe the two most important things if performance is needed.
This old canard again? Hasn't this been debunked multiple times already?<p>"C is not a low-level language"<p>Uh, okay, then what is?<p>What are you comparing it to? Low-level/high-level is not a binary switch, it's a spectrum; exactly how many languages are lower-level than C and how many are higher?