Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:42:25 GMT
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:
 

How does Intel MPX fit in your picture? 

 
I don't know anything about MPX beyond what Wikipedia says, which
includes:
 
|In practice, there have been too many flaws discovered in the design
|for it to be useful, and support has been deprecated or removed from
|most compilers and operating systems.
 
Maybe a less flawed concept would have been more successful, but
apparently MPX has had no such successor.
 
Overall, languages that perform bounds checking seem on the rise,
unlike languages that trap on signed integer overflow, so the window
of opportunity for architectural support gets bigger.
 

Yes, I posted my questions without sufficient thinking.
Intel MPX is about array bound checks which is a separate issue from
catching signed overflow.
The only commonality is that in both cases there is a potential for
significant saving in code size if checks are handled by exception
instead of conditional branch.

However, the question is if there is architectural support that is
significantly better than what can be done with the current
architectural features.  SPARC has architectural tagging support for
LISP, yet a comp.arch poster who worked on a major LISP implementation
(Franz LISP IIRC) reported that their LISP implementation does not use
these instructions.
 
- anton