Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

"C is Not a Low-Level Language"

posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday May 23 2018, @06:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.

pillo writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
"C is Not a Low-Level Language" | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 65 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:33AM (2 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:33AM (#683352) Journal

    C was always considered a mid-level language. Higher level than assembly, but lower level than FORTRAN.

    These days wityh out of order and speculative execution, even asm isn't as low level as it used to be.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:55AM (1 child)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday May 24 2018, @07:55AM (#683464) Journal

    Yeh... I always saw "C" as like a super macro assembler... with nearly everything done by macros neatly defined in standard libraries.

    My Borland Turbo C would let me do inline assembly if I had to... and that was really efficient when I wrote device drivers, when I had to do a lot of bit-fiddling.

    It was kinda like mortar. Where Fortran and Cobol were more like bricks.

    I might write the primitives to a tape transport or display driver in assembly.

    Or write the primitives to a database engine in C.

    But I will take Fortran or Cobol any day to build the program to interface to US.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday May 27 2018, @06:03PM

      by sjames (2882) on Sunday May 27 2018, @06:03PM (#684863) Journal

      I thought of C in much the same way. Back in the days before the optimizers got sophisticated, I think it was fairly apt.

      I do think C is over-used these days. There is no reason to be using a mid-level language for UI.