If anyone was thinking, but in practice it is a low level language, behold Fil-C.

I’ve been a fan of this article for years, though it does often make me think that there really aren’t any true low level languages for our super scalar modern CPUs. Does anyone know of any?

This is one of my favorite papers; it stole about a year and a half of my time. I still pine for Lisp processors although array languages can now self-host on GPUs, which, APL-pilled, I now feel is better. It'd be so cool (...for compiler writers) to be able to control precisely which kernels stay in which cache levels etc.

It's just a matter of personal definitions, it seems. Here is an example:

https://ulanguage.org

What level would you say this language was? Is it a low-level systems language, or is it also usable for writing web sites?

This article is so blatantly fallacious I can't even get past the first couple of paragraphs. Perhaps it makes a stronger case later in the article, but the early claims it makes invoke Meltdown/Spectre, eg. speculative execution, and your CPU being more advanced than a PDP-11, and that C doesn't expose modern CPU features like speculative execution, therefore C is not low-level. But assembly doesn't either. 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.

This is embarrassingly bad.

Maybe not then, but we basically have our own poor man's template system now:

    #define array(T, N) struct array##T##N { T value[N]; }

    void copy(array(int, 32)* x, array(int, 32)* y) {
        *x = *y;
    }

    int main() {
        array(int, 32) x;
        array(int, 32) y = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
        copy(&x, &y);
    }

With (rumors of) lambdas and defer on the way, C is going the way of classic WoW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C29_(C_standard_revision)

>and even the pre- and post-increment operators cleanly lined up with the PDP-11 addressing modes.

pre- and post- increment operators cleanly lined up with... the programmer's conceptualization and objectives--the index is/was frequently used in other contexts than loop bounds and indexing. if that's not your conceptualization, don't use that operator. whether you are on a PDP-11 makes no difference.

In this sense, not even assembly is a low-level language because an instruction may hide what the microcode is actually doing.

IMHO, C is the lowest level a procedural programming language can get.

“Low level language” is one of those terms like “VLSI” (very large scale integration) where they defined it in the 70’s or something, so the academic definition is out-of-sync with what most people would expect.

This is fine, it’s a term of art and those don’t need to be immediately obvious.

I don’t like the title of this article for that reason, though. Really a better title would be something like “a modern x86 processor is not a PDP-11.” The subtitle is perfect basically.