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This discussion has been archived.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 Wootery on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:02PM

    by Wootery (2341) on Thursday May 24 2018, @01:02PM (#683526)

    You can't just say that the CPUs get better at giving performance to the lazy, because a lot of software was built based on that level of performance.

    Of course we can. 'Built based on that level of performance' doesn't mean we can't compare the functionality-to-hardware-capability ratio and conclude that it's plummeted over the years.

    'High-performance' applications like the Unreal Engine or scientific modelling, succeed in making good use of modern hardware. Desktop operating systems and word processors, on the other hand, do much the same as they did 20 years ago, but with vastly higher hardware requirements.

    it just happens to benefit the hardware manufacturer, who gets to keep selling new chips that are better at running the code that people started writing for the last set of chips.

    Well, kinda. I'm more inclined to credit competition in the hardware markets. If AMD and ARM imploded tomorrow, you think Intel would keep working hard on improving their products?

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