True, but AFAIK they all sucked really bad. If you needed to make something that preformed back then you wrote in assembly.
FORTRAN might be a good counterexample. It’s pretty fast, and I’m not actually sure if it’s memory safe; it might be. But, it’s definitely very painful to work with, having had the displeasure.
That’s pure assumption and, as far as I can tell, not actually true. PASCAL was a strong contender. No language was competitive with handwritten assembly for several decades after C’s invention, and there’s no fundamental reason why PASCAL couldn’t benefit from intense compiler optimizations just as C has.
Here are some papers from before C “won”, a more recent article about how PASCAL “lost”, and a forum thread about what using PASCAL was actually like. None of them indicate a strong performance advantage for C.
There were memory-safe languages long before C was invented, though; C was widely considered “dangerous” even at the time.
True, but AFAIK they all sucked really bad. If you needed to make something that preformed back then you wrote in assembly.
FORTRAN might be a good counterexample. It’s pretty fast, and I’m not actually sure if it’s memory safe; it might be. But, it’s definitely very painful to work with, having had the displeasure.
That’s pure assumption and, as far as I can tell, not actually true. PASCAL was a strong contender. No language was competitive with handwritten assembly for several decades after C’s invention, and there’s no fundamental reason why PASCAL couldn’t benefit from intense compiler optimizations just as C has.
Here are some papers from before C “won”, a more recent article about how PASCAL “lost”, and a forum thread about what using PASCAL was actually like. None of them indicate a strong performance advantage for C.