> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language, but the article explicitly does not do this, instead listing assembly as the low-level extreme that C is being compared against.
The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" and C isn't, although it may sound like that, upon a first reading, given the article's contentious tone.
The article is really an argument about how C programmers believe, and constantly state, that they are programming "close to the metal", but what they are really programming is a very fast PDP-11 emulator with lots of implicit behavior.
Implicit behavior like speculative execution and asynchronous execution and lots and lots of caching.
The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" and C isn't, although it may sound like that, upon a first reading, given the article's contentious tone.
The article is really an argument about how C programmers believe, and constantly state, that they are programming "close to the metal", but what they are really programming is a very fast PDP-11 emulator with lots of implicit behavior.
Implicit behavior like speculative execution and asynchronous execution and lots and lots of caching.