C Is Not a Low-level Language: Your computer is not a fast PDP-11 (2018)

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&#x27;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&#x27;s HLA is not popular or maintained by the community.

If you want to see the previous threads, you have to remove &quot;PDP-11&quot; from the search query: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=C%20Is%20Not%20a%20Low-level%20Language%202018&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a><p>Clicking the &quot;past&quot; link by itself won&#x27;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.

To be fair, C was never even considered to be a low level language in cs textbooks, although I see it mentioned at Wikipedia

This old canard again? Hasn&#x27;t this been debunked multiple times already?<p>&quot;C is not a low-level language&quot;<p>Uh, okay, then what is?<p>What are you comparing it to? Low-level&#x2F;high-level is not a binary switch, it&#x27;s a spectrum; exactly how many languages are lower-level than C and how many are higher?

There are vastly more computers out there than x86 and many of them <i>are</i> little more (or less) advanced than a PDP-11.