Átila on Code

I always wonder why people think there’s a mystic quality to C that makes it insanely fast. It’s just assumed to be true by many people, and I really can’t understand why in the face of vast amounts of evidence to the contrary and well, logical reasoning. Just last week a blog post expressed surprise at a benchmark they’d conducted themselves because (paraphrased) “in theory, the C implementation should be faster”.

There are so many problems with this belief. First of all, the fact that Fortran has been beating C since… before C existed, given that Fortrain is the oldest language still in use (depending on your definitions of “old” and “in use”). I guess some people don’t know Fortrain is still important in HPC today?

Secondly, there are languages that are a superset, or close enough, of C, such as C++ and D. Even if somehow, like red vehicles, C were always faster, all one would have to do is rewrite the bottlenecks in C syntax. The AST would be the same, and if using the same backend (gcc or clang, say), why would the assembly output be any different?

Thirdly, and much more importantly, the lack of measurements to accompany that belief or ignoring existing ones. What else can you say?

Maybe part of it is the fact that writing C is so slow and painful. There has to be a reward for it, right? The truth however, is likely to be much closer to doing crunches: annoying, time-consuming, and won’t even give you abs.