Re:What Unix Cost Us [video]
by kragen on Saturday January 18, 2020 @06:33AM
(#22083848)
> Not explaining in more detail a claim that C is responsible for Spectre?
He said trying to paper over the concurrency of the hardware to provide the simple in-order model C expects is responsible for Spectre (and he did explain how Spectre works). This is true but I don't think C is really the reason for this; designing a language that productively exposes parallelism but is easy to program the kinds of things that run fast on modern amd64 CPUs, I think that might be an unsolved problem.
He said trying to paper over the concurrency of the hardware to provide the simple in-order model C expects is responsible for Spectre (and he did explain how Spectre works). This is true but I don't think C is really the reason for this; designing a language that productively exposes parallelism but is easy to program the kinds of things that run fast on modern amd64 CPUs, I think that might be an unsolved problem.