Impressed By Slow Code

A much better C standard library would help a lot into thinking at C code from an higher level point of view. Especially if you have easy to use data structures in form of a lib, it is really easy to resist to use a list and O(N) lookups just to type less code where an hash table is a better feet.<p>Why the C standard library does not get improved with a few data types like linked lists, hash tables, dynamic strings, and so forth is something I can't understand (one common reason why poorly written C code ends slower than equivalent code wrote in a scripting language is because of strlen() and other stupid string operations into a loop ending into exponential time complexity).

<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504672" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504672</a>

"I've seen Python programs that ended up faster than C".<p>Yeah, there is nothing in c that makes it significant faster per se than python, remember python is pre-compiled.<p>C gives you control, it is "portable assembler" if you are used to assembler it is trivial to know exactly what the CPU does, if you can take advantage of it it will be faster, if you can't it wont.<p>With control you can make something run 100-1000 times faster because you know what the computer does, with a high level language you can not control it, period, it is abstracted.<p>That is the use of C or specific hardware(100-1000 less power usage).<p>Low level optimizations for a 10% speed up?. IMHO, Non sense.