[Info-vax] Intel proposal to simplify x86-64

[Scott Dorsey]

Simon Clubley  <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>We have long moved past the point where absolute speed is the primary
>driver in software design. Today, the focus should be on safer computing,
>even at the expense of some overhead. To do otherwise is utterly
>irresponsible in today's world IMHO.

Unfortunately the focus today is on speed and low cost.  People toss together
rapid prototypes and put them into production systems.  Back in the eighties
software engineering people talked about code reusability as being a goal
for improving code quality.  Now people just cut and paste library calls
that they don't understand off of websites and wonder why their machine is
so slow and insecure.

Pretty much all of the things we need to implement very safe computing
systems were developed in the 1970s and 1980s and prototype capability
architectures have been tested and used.  Back then, people were not willing
to live with the substantial performance hit.  Today, that performance hit
is even more of a problem because so much code is written so much more poorly.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."