Re: Seriously, are programmers that bad?..who remembers the HLL debacle of the 1980's?
Since 1988?
.. then you will have pretty much missed the great Pascal, Modula II/III, ADA fiascos of the early / mid 1980's when HLL's were going to solve all the worlds software problems. C was going to be history by 1990.
I can think of at least one major PC software product, one of the biggest names at the time, that was destroyed by the 1980's HLL fad. After their great Modula II total rewrite fiasco they never recovered their market dominance. The Modula II version was so slow as to be unusable. Competitors who stayed with mixed asm / C survived and prospered. Until crushed by MS in the 1990's..
Every single attempt since the 1960's to replace a low level system languages with a HLL has failed. Starting with the PL/I train wreck in the 1960s. It was going to replace every other language. Although Algol on some hardware came very close in the 1970's. Algol was such a nice language to work with.
Since then. If you want performance and optimum use of platform resources, its C. Some projects have started in a HLL but once they got traction the simplest and cheapest way to get a performance boost, was to start rewriting in C.
Rust tries to solve problems that were solved many decades ago by using code validation tools. If you are writing high level applications , fine. But for system software, C written by people who know what they are doing will beat it ever time. Easily.
Of course if you really know what you are doing then mixed asm / C will keep the pipelines / IPU's filled with no blocks and the cache lines prefetched close to 100% of the time. Which is something a HLL could not even attempt to do. No matter how many PhD's are involved. Look at enough compiler code-gen output disassembly and you will see what I mean.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
