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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/10/2023 7:20 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> 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.

Code reuse means library use.

Todays developers knows less about the library functions they use than
they did 40 years ago. Because the number of library functions increased
by a factor 100 or so.

But it would be horrible expensive to develop todays applications
with the libraries from 40 years ago. So very little to do
about that.

Computers are way more secure today than they were 40 years
ago. They have to because the threats have evolved dramatically.

Everything needed to implement safe computing probably existed
40 years ago. But the difficult part of implementing safe
computing is not to have the technology to make it possible or
to use that technology in 98% of cases - the difficult part is
to use it in 100% of cases. It did not happen then and it does
not happen today.

But technology has evolved to help do better. As an example
programming languages in recent years has added null safety
features to try and fix Hoare's billion dollar mistake
(Kotlin, C# 8.0+ etc.).

Arne