[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Tony Finch]

Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

> C is often a “You asked for it, you got it” type paradigm/

Sadly these days it's more like, you asked for a VAX, you got a
Deathstation 9000. (Sadly the classic DS9000 web page has disappeared
and it was never saved by archive.org.)

http://wikibin.org/articles/deathstation-9000.html

It's worth reading Chisnall's other paper (cited by the CACM article) on
formalizing de-facto C. The background for all this is that Robert
Watson's team in Cambridge's Computer Lab has been working on a
capability-secure RISC processor for a number of years, with the goal of
being able to retro-fit hardware accelerated memory security to existing
software. Which means running C on hardware that doesn't look much like a
VAX. So it's helpful to get a better idea of exactly how far you can
deviate from the gcc/clang model of DS9000.

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2908081

Tony.
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