C Is Not a Low-Level Language

I think it just leads to quibbling over the boundary of low level, as is happening here.

I think it's just important to know that the definition changes over time relative to the state of the art. C was once considered high level. In the future, if programming languages evolve to a more natural language state, then sending serial instructions to the computer in a strange code will seem very low level to such programmers.

It uses UltraSPARC T1 and above processors as an example for a "better" processor "not made for C", but this argument makes no sense at all. The "unique" approach in the UltraSPARC T1 was to aim for many simple cores rather than few large cores.

This is simply about prioritizing silicon. Huge cores, many cores, small/cheap/simple/efficient die. Pick two. I'm sure Sun would have loved to cram huge caches in there, as it would benefit everything, but budgets, deadlines and target prices must be met.

Furthermore, the UltraSPARC T1 was designed to support existing C and Java applications (this was Sun, remember?), despite the claim that this was a processor "not designed for traditional C".

There are very few hardware features that one can add to a conventional CPU (which even includes things like the Mill architecture) that would not benefit C as well, and I cannot possibly imagine a feature that would benefit other languages that would be harmful to C. The example of loop count inference for use of ARM SVE being hard in C is particularly bad It is certainly no harder in the common use of a for loop than it is to deduce the length of an array on which a map function is applied.

I cannot imagine a single compromise done on a CPU as a result of conventional programming/C. That is, short of replacing the CPU with an entirely different device type, such as a GPU or FPGA.

We're talking about concrete things in the real world here, not philosophizing about the language spec.

I think that's a fair conclusion though, I don't think the article is misleading.

x86 assembly is a high level language. It's analogous to JVM bytecode. Modern x86 processors are more like a virtual machine for x86 bytecode.

You can write to null in C, your operating system rejects it. You can write past your allocated memory, your OS rejects it. It's not like just because it's written in C it gets to read the kernel memory - it's just that you can try.

All memory access in userspace is mediated by the MMU, so nothing in C gets "direct" memory access - but it does allow you to screw up your own memory space pretty well... I'm not sure that's C's fault though