Re:C Is Not a Low-Level Language
by vvanders on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @04:22PM
(#16971140)
It would be interesting to revisit a world where languages/compilers were built explicitly with common memory access semantics/out of order op/etc in mind.
One of the things that really excites me about Rust is that it's single mutable reference enforcement means you can run run `restrict` 100% of the time if you wanted which is a non-trivial performance boost. I think it's not enabled today but from previous discussions it sounds like that's just a matter of plumbing through the right things to LLVM.
Every time I've seen that rolled out in a C/C++ codebase someone invariably forgets about pointer aliasing and you spend a week tracking down some non-deterministic behavior.
One of the things that really excites me about Rust is that it's single mutable reference enforcement means you can run run `restrict` 100% of the time if you wanted which is a non-trivial performance boost. I think it's not enabled today but from previous discussions it sounds like that's just a matter of plumbing through the right things to LLVM.
Every time I've seen that rolled out in a C/C++ codebase someone invariably forgets about pointer aliasing and you spend a week tracking down some non-deterministic behavior.