Re:C Is Not a Low-level Language (2018)
by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday December 28, 2021 @05:19PM
(#29718972)
So I think we could say that 1) C is low level, and 2) the distance between C and what's really going on is much larger than it used to be, partly because the distance between assembly opcodes and what's really going on is much larger than it used to be.
Re VLIW architectures: I don't know enough to have a take about them specifically. But I fear moving the optimizations from hardware to software, because it's going to be really hard to optimize as well as Intel/AMD/Arm do, and it's going to be really easy to mess something up. (I don't write assembly if I can help it - I let the compiler writer do it. I don't manage memory if I don't need to. And so on.)
I can see some people might benefit from this, but I suspect that it's bleeding-edge people only. Most of us won't gain from going this route.
Re VLIW architectures: I don't know enough to have a take about them specifically. But I fear moving the optimizations from hardware to software, because it's going to be really hard to optimize as well as Intel/AMD/Arm do, and it's going to be really easy to mess something up. (I don't write assembly if I can help it - I let the compiler writer do it. I don't manage memory if I don't need to. And so on.)
I can see some people might benefit from this, but I suspect that it's bleeding-edge people only. Most of us won't gain from going this route.
Note well: Just my take. Your mileage may vary.