"it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language"
"Threaded code is an extraordinarily simple and elegant way to implement language interpreters. Compared to bytecoded interpreters it is quite fast, and compilers for it are essentially trivial... Because it creates a system entirely composed of uniform pieces, extensibility of the system by users is almost unlimited, and building generic tools is dramatically simplified!"