“Your computer is not a fast PDP-11.”
CPUs are still optimized to run C, which was “close to the metal” in the 1970s, but is a direly misleading model for modern hardware.
Large inefficiencies & security problems result.

@Plinz,@JohnDCook
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 …
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The point, though, is that a modern CPU is (in 1980s terms) a MIMD array of vector supercomputers, each with a VLIW scalar controller pretending to be a 80386. C doesn’t correspond to that at all, and it takes extraordinary feats of compilation to make it run effectively.
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If Intel gave us a channel to access the highly-parallel hardware directly, we could compile paralellizable code to utilize more of the crunch more of the time. And then functional languages, and vector languages, would probably run faster than C.
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