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A comment on Meltdown and Spectre. Parent comment

Re:Meltdown and Spectre by willtim on Thursday January 04, 2018 @11:27AM (#16071572)
Side-effects strike again! Not only does the hardware have observable side-effects that are not cleaned-up, but our browser languages allow pervasive side-effects which are used for exploits (e.g. precision timing).
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Re:Meltdown and Spectre by hn_throwaway_99 on Thursday January 04, 2018 @11:49AM (#16071776)
Note one of the mitigations for this is that Mozilla (and I'm guessing other browsers) is reducing the resolution of performance.now()
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Re:Meltdown and Spectre by SonOfLilit on Thursday January 04, 2018 @11:53AM (#16071821)
From the Spectre paper: Chrome reduced resolution of performance.now(), so they set up a webworker with a tight loop that increments a shared variable.
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Re:Meltdown and Spectre by willtim on Thursday January 04, 2018 @12:05PM (#16071937)
Yes and creating one or more "web workers" (threads) is a significant side-effect. Javascript to me, looks more like a systems-programming language (imperative with threads and sockets) than something trusted for interactive web sites. The web is a huge mess and today we learn that hardware is too.
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Re:Meltdown and Spectre by devit on Thursday January 04, 2018 @12:00PM (#16071886)
This is why Mozilla also removed support for shared variables (i.e. SharedArrayBuffer).
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