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Is Java faster than C/C++? The short answer is: it depends.

Henry Spencer said, “Those who don’t understand UNIX are doomed to reinvent it, poorly.” And that’s probably why so many of the programs written in C are more reliable than our prejudices might suggest - the UNIX culture, the oldest and wisest in mainstream computing, has found ways of turning some of C’s limitations and flaws into advantages.

Imagine that it’s fifteen years from now. Somebody announces that he’s built a large quantum computer. RSA is dead. DSA is dead. Elliptic curves, hyperelliptic curves, class groups, whatever, dead, dead, dead. So users are going to run around screaming and say ‘Oh my God, what do we do?

The time has come to reject expensive consumer and prosumer software that hinders the extensibility of digital discourse and limits digital production literacy to programs and file formats that are destined for disruptive upgrades or obsolescence.

Digital scholars in the loosely defined fields of rhetoric and composition, computers and writing, and technical communication should create free and open source artifacts that are software- and device-independent. Discourse posted on the open Web can hardly be considered free if access requires costly software or particular devices.

Linux kernel is mostly written in the C language. Unlike many other languages C does not have a good collection of data structures built into it or supported by a collection of standard libraries. Therefore, you’re probably excited to hear that you can borrow a good implementation of a circularly-linked list in C from the Linux kernel source tree.