Yes it is. I’m unswayed by your arguments. You start out by defining a low level language, concede that C meets your definition, and then go on to argue that even so, it’s not a low level language.
>> "A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant."<p>Wow, today I learned there are only low-level programming languages.
The author apparently has never heard of microcontrollers, or in fact is aware that the 68000 is still in <i>widespread</i> use and in production to this day, nearly half a century later.<p>The author's entire argument seems to be that modern x86 CPUs are completely and totally distinct from the simple processors of yore, and one <i>cannot</i> apply the same mental model to them. That's fair, even if it's not strictly true.<p>Then they take a logical leap to say that nobody can program bare metal x86 like a 68000, therefore C cannot be a low level language at all in any circumstances for any platform. Which is just obviously false?<p>On simple CPUs like modern RISCs and AVRs or indeed 68000s, C is just assembly with extra steps. We <i>still</i> program these CPUs the same way we have for decades. In this situation, C is as bare metal as it gets without writing assembly. In C, you're still manipulating CPU registers, you still have to manage memory yourself, you're still programming the machine itself with only the lightest of abstractions.<p>If the author wanted to claim that there is no such thing as a low level language on x86, that's fine. I strongly disagree, but it's a valid argument. Asserting that C is not a low level language is not a valid argument.<p>Is C a bad model for modern processors? Yes, <i>absolutely</i>. Does that reflect on C itself in any way? No, these are <i>two different things</i>. We absolutely do need a better model and language than C for modern systems, but C is still the same as it's always been. It's still a low level language because millions of developers still use it on simple non-pipelined CPUs every day. The existence of other types of processors doesn't somehow change that fact.
If it has inline assembly it’s low-level in my opinion. This feature (or at a minimum the ability to link against and interface with assembled objects) is _the_ requirement for all hardware-facing programming, since general purpose programming languages cannot represent all possible hardware minutiae within the language.
> it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler<p>Just because some of the C++ code I write heavily relies on ISA-specific SIMD intrinsics doesn’t replace the language with some other one, it’s remains to be C++. Compared to solving the general problem by making a sufficiently smart automatically vectorizing C compiler, learning SIMD intrinsics is way more manageable.<p>BTW, a few years ago I wrote an article about SSE 1-4 and AVX 1-2 ISA extensions, as exposed to C and C++ languages: <a href="http://const.me/articles/simd/simd.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://const.me/articles/simd/simd.pdf</a>
I would say it is only a low level language if it's a form of assembly or used in systems programming like Linux or OpenBSD or whatever else in the kernel land