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Comment by occamrazor | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand. CPUs do not support C, they support a specific instruction set. What stops them from having instructions for cache management, pipelining, speculative execution hints, etc?

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They do not support C officially, but every CPU designer knows that 99%+ of the code that matters is written in C. Therefore they design chips targeting this translation from C. What the authors want is a better lower level interface that would allow for modern processor features without the legacy of the features available to the PDP11.

> 99%+ of the code that matters is written in C

I think a better way of stating this is "99% of the code that matters is written in C, or in a language designed with a similar target architecture as C in mind". Certainly a lot of code that matters is written in C++, Objective-C, and Java, but the same points hold true for all of those.

Many of these features are very difficult to use in a useful way in a static context (e.g. at compile time) because the performance gains mostly come from taking advantage of dynamic context. Speculative execution and out of order execution for example are mostly useful because you don't know at compile time exactly what data your code is processing or what CPU it is running on, what function / context you are being called from, what is in cache and what isn't, etc.

The SPUs on the PlayStation 3 were an experiment in user managed caches and that proved to be a difficult thing to make effective use of even in games where you know more context than a lot of code can assume.

The Itanium processor did exactly this. Other than being a commercial flop, it was found to be quite difficult to actually get the compiler to generate good management instructions, and x86 was often able to beat out an itanium core at the same clock speed

It seems like x86 exists at a local maxima, and Itanium didn't go far enough away to find a different peak.

Games console CPUs support those kind of instructions, don't they?

To some extent, didn't Intel go down this road with VLIW: trying to shift the burden of making code fast onto the compiler, instead of the CPU?

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