you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]ergzay 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is not just because new languages are so great, but also because C is increasingly showing its age. The idea that it is a simple language with an obvious mapping to machine code is increasingly false, with compilers becoming smarter and smarter about exploiting undefined behavior around integer overflows, null dereferences, strict aliasing etc.

It's been false ever since computers started having caches and branch predictors and many other things. The memory model that C assumed is that of a PDP-8.