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Meltdown & Spectre is actually consequence of C, Intel adapted their CPUs to emulate the architecture that C implements, so you as developer can still believe t
by fetbaffe 6y ago
Meltdown & Spectre is actually consequence of C, Intel adapted their CPUs to emulate the architecture that C implements, so you as developer can still believe that you are working close to the metal. However modern CPUs are very complex so the abstraction was leaky, thus bugs.
This is why we have to abandon C, not only is the language unsafe, it has also driven hardware manufacturing to a bad state with a reinforcing feedback loop, the more C we write the more hardware manufacturers want to make you believe that we still are working on PDP-11.
- amqpp 6y agoNot only that, C is solely responsible for the October revolution and WWII. C was Pol Pot's favorite language and is reportedly used by the Taliban.
- fetbaffe 6y agoBig if true :-) But here is a great article https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoA very odd article. Everything that said applies to any other compiled programming language, not only C. Even if Pascal or Ada had become more popular than C/C++, it would still have lead to the same architectural decisions we see in x86. In fact the biggest offender - SMT is actually the opposite of instruction-level parallelism the authors are blaming the x86 for.