[libre-riscv-dev] offtopic: memory safety

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019, 04:01 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 10:38 AM Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > actually, rust is normally an ahead-of-time compiler -- I haven't heard
> of
> > any JIT compiled modes yet,
>
>  oh: i assumed that because it was using llvm, that JIT was the only
> option.  iiinteresting...
>
yeah -- if it was jit, i wouldn't have considered it for a vulkan driver.

>
> > it can directly generate assembly, though it usually uses llvm's
> integrated
> > assembler to output machine code directly -- just like clang.
>
>  okaay.  that alleviates my concerns.
>
yay :)

>
> > also see https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
> > rust compiler written in C++ for code that is already known to have no
> > compile errors -- translates to C -- currently mostly used for
> > bootstrapping rustc
>
>  ooOo.  that's very interesting, in its own right [the very first gnu
> g++ compiler was also a c++ to c language translator]
>
>From what I understand, when gcc added c++ support, it was a native c++
compiler (not a c++ -> c compiler). maybe you were thinking of cfront --
one of the original c++ compilers (not g++) which did translate C++ -> C.


> I think they may drop some legacy support when intel drops mmx support
> > (which I hear intel's planning on -- amd already dropped fp in mmx
> > (3dnow!)), which has been replaced by sse2+ and avx since pentium 4 and
> > amd64.
>
>  yehhh if there's no hardware _left_ to run the legacy software, you
> can be preeetty sure that anyone on that combination is never, ever
> going to upgrade :)
>
just hope it's not connected to the internet. eventually, the systems will
be so outdated that all the malware won't run on them anymore. I'd expect
that no one makes malware for the 8085 or VAX anymore, though there's
probably a few left making DOS malware.

Jacob