C-Based languages

C is an amazingly designed language.  It's beautiful, simple, elegant and fast.
Everything a well designed programming language should be.

C++ then came along and shit all over Dennis Ritchie's masterpiece.  Bjarne took a beautiful, simple, elegant and fast language. And kept shitting on it until all that was left was 'fast'.  Dennis should of beat the shit out of him for turning his work of art into an abomination.

Then Gosling came along, surveyed the turd that Bjarne had dropped, and attempted to clean it up.    He redesigned C++ to remove the crap and attain the elegance that C had.  Unfortunately, in his cleaning frenzy, he over-simplified the language and sacrificed speed.  In the name of simplicity he removed pointers, manual memory management,  generics, operator overloading and native code compilation.  A noble effort, but ultimately just as much of a failure as C++.

>>80
66
Why are you using 16-bit mode with 32-bit instructions?

>>89
No. You forgot about the stack.

>>63
Just don't use the features that are too bloaty.

>>67
They need to improve their code generator. As-is, it's probably the extremely simple single-pass type, with very few rules. The patterns are obvious: It almost always uses eax and edx for transfers, and ebx for the first pointer dereference. Occasionally it will use esi and edi for loop counters. Besides the loop counter exception, it does not seem able to keep track of register values beyond more than 3-4 instructions at most (likely expression boundaries).

>>20
We've almost reached the physical limits of hardware. That's why you see systems getting wider. But not everything can be parallelised. I've recently worked with some cloud/distributed systems stuff written in Java, and despite what they say, the efficiency is horrible. A C/C++ rewrite could easily cut memory usage and execution times to 1/10th what they are.

Another example: look at boot times of various operating systems over the year when run on their recommended hardware configuration. If there has been improvement, it is nothing near the order-of-magnitude growth in speed that processors have had for the past 2 decades. Faster hardware enables us to do more; but at the same time, also entices us to waste it. In other words there has been growth at the "top edge" of productivity, but the "bottom line" has remained essentially unchanged. MS has been aggressive in marketing the boot speed of Windows 7 and Windows 8, but to get those "improvements" they had to remove a lot of the existing functionality in previous versions. Does that fit with the notion of hardware being faster? "Do less with more" is where things seem to be going with software these days, and it is only to create the illusion that things are improving. As Apple's success shows, with the right marketing you can turn anti-features into features perceived by the masses of mindless consumer drones.

This level of waste is not sustainable --- look back to the 1970s energy crisis (were you even alive back then?) --- "let's waste resources because they seem infinite for the time being" was the attitude people had before then, and it didn't result in anything good.