Please correct me if I’m wrong, but this ACM rant seems to amount to blaming C language for the most disastrous embarrassment in the history of Intel Corp, i.e. spectre/meltdown. Well, thank you very much, but that’s just deranged thinking, or someone was on INTL payroll in 2018.
but wow, thank you, what a gem. he then proceeds to elucidate how C is broken and again not low-level enough, because his 1337 skills require knowing the cache line size. well, this is absolutely true, captain Chisnall. but what is complete and utter nonsense is the conclusion that C is retarded by not letting the programmer manipulate the cache directly:
“The cache is, as its name implies, hidden from the programmer and so is not visible to C. Efficient use of the cache is one of the most important ways of making code run quickly on a modern processor, yet this is completely hidden by the abstract machine, and programmers must rely on knowing implementation details of the cache (for example, two values that are 64-byte-aligned may end up in the same cache line) to write efficient code.“
This deserves a WAT.