[Cryptography] WireGuard

[metzdowd at bikkel.org]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 10:24:15PM +0200, danimoth wrote:
> 
> On 30/08/18 at 04:56pm, Howard Chu wrote:
> > Jerry Leichter wrote:
> > > Computer technology goes through these kinds of cycles.  It was not
> > > so many years ago when it was "obvious" that certain things were
> > > fixed forever:  The Intel x86 ISP was the end of CPU evolution; C
> > > was the low-level language; Windows was the OS; VB was the
> > > high-level language; desktops were the form factor.  All those
> > > moments lost in time, like tears in rain.
> > 
> > C is still the low-level language...
> 
> Might I disagree? That was true on PDP-11, not anymore. That opens up an
> entire set of flaws which are introduced by hardware makers in the
> tentative to speed up things, because we do not have anymore a fast low-level
> language suitable for the modern hardware (well, except for ASM).
 
Might I disagree? Facts on the ground say that C is still the most used
low-level language:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/371752/the-most-used-language-for-debian
https://sources.debian.org/stats/
https://sources.debian.org/static/img/stats/ALL-sloc_pie-current.png

> 
> Worth reading: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/7/229036-c-is-not-a-low-level-language/abstract

s disagree with the ACM article (outline). Spectre and Meltdown are 
*CPU bugs*, which would also have affected you if you where programming 
in assembly (duh). The 'features' that led to the bugs where things like 
branch prediction (something that is happening in the CPU, invisible for
the machine code above) and is totally independent of the language used. 

Is there any language which was not affected by Spectre and Meltdown? No.