It's unfortunate, but the approach would hopefully be to write the smallest possible primitives in assembly and then use a safer language for the rest of the co

It's unfortunate, but the approach would hopefully be to write the smallest possible primitives in assembly and then use a safer language for the rest of the code that either doesn't need constant time guarantees, or gets those guarantees by building on the primitives. This means that verification against these sort of basic attacks can be focused on a much smaller amount of code, rather than every single location in the whole code-base that manipulates memory (as in C). (And, one can go a step further: extract assembly from some higher-level language/DSL designed to create constant time code.) In any case, the code in question for this post doesn't seem to be written to be timing sensitive.