Hacker News Reader

Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: This is just some cursory research using LLMs.

C was invented to rewrite UNIX in a programming language that made it easy to port UNIX between machines.

So what you're saying is contradictory. You're saying the underlying motivation of C was wrong or unnecessary (porting UNIX to different hardware architectures) but C won because that underlying motivation (easy porting between hardware architectures) was partially right.

Your position is now that C didn't need UNIX as a stopgap, which is weird because your argument gains no weight (basically saying C's dominance is sheer coincidence) if it's true but if it's false you're just plain wrong.

View on HN

My point is that C's popularity quickly outgrew the popularity of UNIX, especially during most of the 1990s before Linux made UNIX accessible to us "PC peasants". Most 1990s PC games were written in C, and C was also the dominant high level language on 16/32 bitters like the Amiga or Atari ST.

Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

On the consoles it took until PlayStation for C to take off among game devs.

Additionally many Amiga games used Blitz BASIC and AMOS.

Anyone involved in the Demoscene early days would be 100% Assembly as well.

On PC, it required until Watcom with its great MS-DOS extender for devs to finally move away from Assembly in mass.

> Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

I was there, Gandalf ;)

(and note how I specifically wrote "dominant high level language", not "dominant language", since assembly coding was indeed very relevant on those machines, for UI apps 100% assembly was quite rare though, and hybrid C/ASM seems to have been more common).

Dominant in which part of the planet?

In my part of the Iberian Penisula it was Turbo Pascal on PC and AMOS/Blitz Basic on Amiga.

With lots of inline Assembly anyway.

If id Software is any indication, apparently they wrote their games in C since their inception in 1990 with Commander Keen.

One tree doesn't make a forest.

> Nope, they were mostly written in Assembly.

It depends: for the classic 8 bit home computers, games were mostly written in assembly. Later DOS games were commonly either written in Pascal or C, but quite a bit off Assembler code was often used for the more performance-critical code sections.

The "quite a bit of Assembler" is relevant.

I have seen code where folks used Pascal or C compilers as poor man's macro assemblers, the "quite a bit" was rather large.

As far as I know, this depended a lot on the individual game:

Games that had quite a bit of code that profited from the higher-level abstractions that C/Pascal provided, such as

- resource management (including dynamic asset loading/unloading)

- enemy AI

- pathfinding

- ...

of course typically contained a lot more C/Pascal code than games that were more on the "multimedia demo" side with a simpler game logic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com