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Linus Torvalds says RISC-V will make the same mistakes as Arm and x86 (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 4 months ago by neme@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] arality@programming.dev 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

software level architecture that can be used on various different CPU architectures providing maximum flexibility.

I've only done a little bare metal programming, but I really don't see how this is possible. Everything I've used is so vastly different, I think it would be impossible to create something like that, and have it work well.

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

theoretically you could do it by defining an architecture operations standard, and then adhering to that somewhat when designing a CPU. While providing hardware flexibility as you could simply, not implement certain features, or implement certain other features. Might be an interesting idea.

That or something that would require minimal "instruction translation" between different architectures.

It's like x86. except if most of the features were optional.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 0 points 4 months ago

It sounds like you're just reinventing either the JVM (runtime instruction translation), compilers (LLVM IR), or something in between (JIT interpreters).

The problem is that it's a hard problem to solve generally without expensive tradeoffs:

interpreter like JVM - will always have performance overhead and can't easily target arch-specific optimizations like SIMD
compiler - need a separate binary per arch, or have large binaries that can do multiple
JIT - runtime cost to compiling optimizations

Each is fine and has a use case, but I really don't think we need a hardware agnostic layer, we just need languages that help alleviate issues with different architectures. For example, Rust's ownership model may help prevent bugs that out of order execution may expose. It could also allow programmers to specify more strict limits on types (e.g. non-zero numbers, for example), which could aid arch-specific optimizations).