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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Sun opened the SPARC T2 a decade ago, and it certainly has not become popular

I'm not saying it would have become any more popular without this, but the fact that Oracle purchased Sun probably didn't help adoption here, at all.

Which is a pity, as currently the SPARC is the only commercial CPU able to tame C.

At least with luck those features are coming to ARM v8.3+ as well.

> Which is a pity, as currently the SPARC is the only commercial CPU able to tame C.

What do you mean? That it includes protection modes which make C "safe"?

SPARC has weird register windows that scare C programmers out of playing games with the stack, resulting in safer operation.

SPARC ADI is a bit more than that.

SPARC has memory tagging support since M7.

This is enabled by default in Solaris since version 11.

"Secure Software - Made Simple with Software in Silicon"

ARM v8.5 memory tagging extensions aims to try to achieve parity with it.

Google is planning to make use of them on the native layer of Android when they eventually became available.

Meanwhile Intel has decided to remove MPX from x86/x64 because no one is adopting them on Intel/AMD CPUs.

EDIT: Got the ARM version wrong.

A minor nit, but memory tagging is in ARMv8.5, not 8.3.

Thanks, fixed it.

5 minutes of googling hasn't given me anything about SPARC and C. Can you elaborate?

Check my other reply.

You need to be a bit comfortable with Solaris and enterprise web sites to dig it out.