🚀 go-pugleaf

The major reason that C can never be as fast as Fortran is that
a Fortran function can assume that two arrays are not aliases for
each other, whereas C must assume that two arrays/pointers could
be aliases. This prevents a lot of parallelising and loop-unrolling
optimisations from being legal in C.

There was a proposed 'noalias' keyword for C (or was it C++?) that
was withdrawn, apparently after Dennis Ritchie more-or-less
vetoed it. This would have provided a partial solution to the
problem in that it would have been possible for the programmer
to explicitly indicate that two parameters were not to be aliases
for the same array/variable.

Does anyone know where I can read up on the exact reasons for
this decision, and any work that is currently going on in the
same area.

--
Erik Corry ehcorry@inet.uni-c.dk