> They've hit the same problem, it's now hard to just ramp the clock speed so they are > having to find better algorithms to make code run faster. As there is a lot of C++ > code out there then I'd expect to see improvements in compilers and the processors > ability to run the generated code faster. Which of course you also don't get the > benefit if you write in assembler.
Agreed. And it's nice that there's competition in compilers again, too. Microsoft is touting "native development" as a feature for VC++ 11, and there's some pretty radical plans for GCC 5.0 in response to Clang starting to eat their lunch.