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"C is not a low-level language"

Accepted submission by pillo at 2018-05-23 12:32:38 from the your-computer-is-not-a-fast-PDP-11 dept.
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Very interesting article [acm.org] 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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