Yeah don't worry too much about it. You are still young, this is your first book. That is a great accomplishment.
Don't let the comments discourage you, use them, learn from them and your next undertaking will be even better. Be proud of what you did. It is unreasonable that your first attempt would be perfect.
I see, you thought I meant that C was the only language with this property. No there are plenty of others, I was fully aware of that. I on the other hand thought you meant that JOVIAL in some way was even thinner or more tuned to underlying architecture in some way that made it thinner than C.
I am curious, what was it I said that you consider to be a myth? If I have some misunderstanding I would like to know. I looked at JOVIAL on wikipedia quickly but I can't see exactly how it would be thinner than C or if it's compiler would output something vastly different to a C compiler. Or did you mean it's as thin as C but it came out earlier?
True, it doesn't give you the bare machine. What it gives you is the thinnest of machine abstraction with the possibility of linking to your own assembly if you have the demand for it.
This is, perhaps surprisingly, what I consider the strength of C. It doesn't hide the issues behind some language abstraction, you are in full control of what the machine does. The bug is right there in front of you if you are able to spot it (given it's not hiding away in some 3rd party library of course) which of course takes many years of practice but once you have your own best practices nailed down this doesn't happen as often as you might expect.
Also, code doesn't need to be bulletproof. When you design your program you also design a scope saying this program will only work given these conditions. Programs that misbehaves outside of your scope is actually totally fine.
First off, I want to congratulate you on reaching this milestone. I think this is the state where the most seasoned programmers end up. They know how to write code that works and they don't need a language to "help" or "guide" them.
If Linux previously always outperformed Windows the result should be similar this time around as well. It could possibly be some missing feature or a bug in the linux drivers but it sounds unlikely to me. I mean the architecture isn't fundamentally different. Maybe windows ignores some thermal throttling? Something smells fishy here for sure.
I just want to be a bit picky and say that bike shedding means focusing on trivial matters while ignoring or being oblivious to the complicated parts. What he described sounded more like a combination of feature creep/over-engineering.
A command-line tool called berk that is a versatile job dispatcher written in c. It is meant to replace big clunky tools like Jenkins, Ansible etc. It has syntax similar to git. It works pretty well, just need to iron out some kinks before final release. https://github.com/jezze/berk
Don't let the comments discourage you, use them, learn from them and your next undertaking will be even better. Be proud of what you did. It is unreasonable that your first attempt would be perfect.