On 19/01/2018 00:48, Paul wrote:
Brian Gregory wrote:
On 17/01/2018 11:28, Paul wrote:
PeterC wrote:
https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

with a warning not to d/l from other sites.

That page says it's "written in assembler" ???
LOL. Maybe he inserted a couple of #pragma and
20 lines of assembler or something. I doubt the
entire program is assembler. Only a kook would
do that (we had such a kook at work).

This is very "I couldn't do it therefore anyone who could is weird".

I know most people like to write in high level languages and adopt a
get something down now and we can poke and prod at it randomly later
until it seems to work right.

Surely being able to write code in a language that more or less
demands you get it 100% right first time and succeed in getting it
right is something to be admired.


It's called using the right tool for the job.

I can build the Taj Mahal from toothpicks, but
that doesn't make it right.

For some tasks, you have to drop to assembler, as a HLL
just won't do. If you're good, you'll use your tools
selectively, a hammer for hammering, a screwdriver
for driving screws - not a hammer for driving screws.

A GUI doesn't need to be built from assembler. That's
why they put all those APIs and libraries there, so you
need less than a page of code to put it on the screen.

If you need to emit a privileged CPUID instruction in
your code, I'd buy the need to do a little inline code
or the like, to do it. Some things require a few tricks,
if they aren't in a library already.

Â*Â* Paul

Just because it's not the right tool for you doesn't mean it's not the
right tool for someone who does it all the time and has a massive
library of macros to help him.

I bet most of the 5 or 6 days it took him to do it were taken up with
reading and understanding the processors and the vulnerabilities anyway.

--

Brian Gregory (in England).