[HN Gopher] Pointers Are Complicated, Or: What's in a Byte? (2018)
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       Pointers Are Complicated, Or: What's in a Byte? (2018)
        
       Author : pcr910303
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2020-09-04 17:10 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ralfj.de)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ralfj.de)
        
       | raphlinus wrote:
       | Also potentially relevant: Ralf, or I should say, Dr. Jung,
       | recently completed a PhD, which I'm sure will have a lot more
       | fascinating material for those interested in this paper. I'm
       | hoping to find time myself to read it, but I seem to spend too
       | much time on sites like Hacker News...
       | 
       | https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/09/03/phd.html
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | teddyh wrote:
       | It always bothered me that C, and similar languages which are
       | termed "low level", aren't actually compiling to anything like
       | the _actual_ low level hardware anymore. The match used to be
       | quite close in the 1980's, but nowadays the "machine code" which
       | is "run" by a CPU is actally a kind of virtual byte code language
       | with an interpreter implemented in microcode inside the CPU. But
       | this byte code has flaws: For instance, this virtual machine byte
       | code language has little or no sense of memory caches (of any
       | kind), out-of-order execution, branch prediction, etc. Both the
       | compiler and the CPU knows (or could know) about these things,
       | but the compiler has no way to communicate this to the CPU other
       | than using this '80s style byte code which does _not_ have these
       | concepts. It's like talking about advanced mathematics using
       | nothing but words in "The Cat in the Hat" - a rather narrow
       | communication pipe.
       | 
       | I'd always imagined that as parallelism rose, a new model of
       | virtual machine would rise with it, with its own "assembly" (i.e.
       | low level language closely tied to the machine), which would in
       | turn be the target of a compiler of a new parallel-by-default
       | high level language. Alas, this has not happened.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Discussed at the time:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17604402
        
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