Re: [wmii] 10kloc project, wmii maintainer change

Karl Guertin wrote:
> Actually, the reason modern compilers provide so much optimization is
> because the target language no longer matches the instruction set of
> the underlying machine. The constructs in C correspond fairly closely
> to the machine instructions of a PDP-11, but not so much to to x86,
> arm, power, etc. A lot of the complexity lies in mapping new machine
> instructions and architecture to a 30 year old close-to-metal
> language.
    Furthermore, this problem is only going to become worse. There are
many things that can be done to improve the performance of processors,
but they are only starting to be put into commercial production because
C is a very poor computational model for the underlying architecture.
Future processors are going to require you to write highly parallel
code, something that is virtually impossible in C because it has no
notion of concurrency.

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw@cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]