C Is Not a Low-Level Language
This article makes some valid points but is overall rather misleading I think. Almost all of the reasons given why C is "not a low-level language" also apply to x86/x64 assembly. Register renaming, cache hierarchies, out of order and speculative execution etc are not visible at the assembly / machine code level either on Intel or other mainstream CPU architectures like ARM or Power PC. If C is not a low level language then a low level language does not exist for modern CPUs and since all other languages ultimately compile down to the same instruction sets they all suffer from some of the same limitations.<p>It's really backwards compatibility of instruction sets / architectures that imposes most of these limitations. Processors that get around them to some degree like GPUs do so by abandoning some amount of backwards compatibility and/or general purpose functionality and that is in part why they haven't displaced general purpose CPUs for general purpose use.