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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:47PM
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
Very interesting article at the IEEE ACM by David Chisnall.
In the wake of the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, it's worth spending some time looking at root causes. Both of these vulnerabilities involved processors speculatively executing instructions past some kind of access check and allowing the attacker to observe the results via a side channel. The features that led to these vulnerabilities, along with several others, were added to let C programmers continue to believe they were programming in a low-level language, when this hasn't been the case for decades.
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There will be big changes for you but you will be happy.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 23 2018, @09:48PM
We used a couple of 6811 C compilers back in the 90s: a French company called Cosmic which produced pretty good 6811 code, and some godforsaken port of a Z80 compiler that also output 6811 instructions but often resulted in 10x the code size and 1/10th the speed, or worse. Same code would compile and run on both compilers, but with Cosmic I usually couldn't improve the assembly code - not often enough to worry about, anyway. That other compiler should have been booted on day one, but it can be hard to separate developers from their preferred tools - especially when the developer was your boss.
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