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Re:Spectre and the end of langsec by milesvp on Thursday January 11, 2018 @01:24PM (#16126332)
I still dream of a day where the compiler largely handles this kind of thing for you. I'm starting to suspect that this day may never come, but it feels like a logical extension of the jit. To have code that self modifies not just itself to run faster, but also the hardware it runs on just seems so cool.

Course, in the context of the larger thread, I can't help but wonder how much more attack surface this would tend to create.

Re:Spectre and the end of langsec by qubex on Thursday January 11, 2018 @02:55PM (#16127230)
I remember something marketed as a “hypercomputer” by Starburst Systems or something like that (long since defunct, apparently... I'm referring back to the late 1990s and early 2000s) that “compiled software to hardware” by substituting parallel CPUs with FPGAs.
Re:Spectre and the end of langsec by Aloha on Thursday January 11, 2018 @04:26PM (#16128047)
This approach has been tried - as it turns out, we're not very good at writing compilers.
Re:Spectre and the end of langsec by zzzcpan on Thursday January 11, 2018 @04:42PM (#16128188)
Compilers are sort of at the edge of technology, there is always some value in trying again, no matter how many times it has been tried before.