Gibson's Meltdown/Spectre Tester

Wolf K wrote:
On 2018-01-18 18:53, Brian Gregory wrote:
On 17/01/2018 15:10, Wolf K wrote:
On 2018-01-17 08:24, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
On Wed, 17 Jan 2018 06:28:20 -0500, 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).

Steve is exactly that sort of kook, but mostly harmless. He's been
boasting of writing assembly language Windows apps for 25 years or so,
and I've not seen anyone do a disassembly and deny that it's
handcrafted. He is a loon.

Cheers - Jaimie


OK, but is he a clever loon?


Definitely.

He uses a large library of macros with assembler so his code does look
rather like a weird high level language of his own design.


:-)

All high level languages are really more-or-less-systematically created
and organised macros.


The GRC utility is not re-sizable and needs to be
scrolled to read the output. Why exactly ? Why doesn't
it just drop a text file for us to read, using
applications we can control (Notepad can be resized).

This made it hard for me to take a screenshot, so I could
show people all the output, in one picture.

It's possible if the application had used a standard HLL library,
the dialog could have had standard behaviors, such as a resize
corner.

This is why you don't do your own G.D. GUI.

I'm a hardware guy, but I've also written software. I
spent a month once writing software. I decided it would
be a good call to use low-complexity graphics widgets
for my screen. The result looked terrible, and was
one of the worst features of the program. If I'd used
the regular library all the other designers used, it
would at least have looked no worse than what they
were making. But this is how we learn, apparently.

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| The GRC utility is not re-sizable and needs to be
| scrolled to read the output. Why exactly ? Why doesn't
| it just drop a text file for us to read, using
| applications we can control (Notepad can be resized).
|
| This made it hard for me to take a screenshot, so I could
| show people all the output, in one picture.

CTRL+A, CTRL+C

Of course if he'd written it in "HLL" he could have
also had an edit context menu for that, requiring
about 30 seconds to code rather than 9 hours.

I think we're all getting too old. This is turning
into one of those long threads where all the
geezers jump in:

My first computer was an abacus....

That's nothin'. We had an abacus made with stones,
and they slid uphill both ways....

Oh yeah, I remember that. My boss made me
chip and polish the stones myself....

You had an abacus?...


Whether it's feminists or programmers,
there are always the oldtimers who think
the new people have it too easy and that
they just haven't been issued enough
medals and certificates.

Paul writes:
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.

A lot of what you may need is available as compiler intrinsics anyway
(for instance MSVC has a ocuple for cpuid). But indeed, not everything.
Rotates and use of the carry flag are the the ones I usually miss.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

Diesel wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)"
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:22:19 GMT in
alt.windows7.general, wrote:

In message
, pjp
writes: []
I'm surprised people find assembler something they don't expect to
be used anymore. I would suspect that an assembler level
programmer would build up a toolbox of canned routines used over
and over again no different than people constantly using any
language. Even in C/C++/Pascal & Delphi (geez even dBase in it's
day) I had a library of "utility" routines I constantly used.

I was somewhat startled in discussion with a youngish computing
graduate - I think in the last ten years, but probably not much
more recent than that - to discover he'd never done any assembler.
But IT is so big these days that there will indeed be room for
people at all levels. And, sad though it may be for some of us
oldies, modern processing power (and storage, both RAM and disc)
are such that it really isn't necessary to write compact code
(unless you're writing for microcontrollers - and even those have
huge amounts compared to what I grew up with).

Those are not valid reasons to cease writing tight/compact code.
Those are excuses to make your program bloated and resource wasteful
and we continue to see ample evidence of just that.


Is assembler consistent with doing modular, collaborative projects which
require unit testing and continuous integration?

I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices.

On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

[snip]

I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices.

Why don't you find out whether your first sentence is true before
stating the second?

I do not code in assembler these days, but I would not be
surprised to find similar tools for system development as those used
for HLLs.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

In message , Gene Wirchenko
writes:
On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris
wrote:

[snip]

I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices.

Why don't you find out whether your first sentence is true before
stating the second?

I do not code in assembler these days, but I would not be
surprised to find similar tools for system development as those used
for HLLs.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

You can write project procedures that define the inputs and outputs that
modules generate and expect, whether those modules are written in
assembler or a high-level language (or coded for hardware, for that
matter, such as VHDL or Handel-C). The compilers (for high-level
languages - equivalents for assembler or hardware code) _can_ provide a
baseline set of such. A _good_ optimiser can remove unnecessary
interfaces (such as where module X has code to generate standard output,
where it only interfaces to module Y, which immediately converts
standard input back to the same internal form as module X was using);
this would usually happen at an integration level. (An excellent project
manager will assign/subdivide the project to minimise such interfaces
anyway, but modern optimisers are often good enough to avoid the need
for excellent project managers of this type.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Where [other presenters] tackle the world with a box of watercolours, he
takes a spanner. - David Butcher (on Guy Martin), RT 2015/1/31-2/6

On 18/01/2018 22:40, Chronos wrote:
Of course, now we have Meltdown and Spectre, you'll all be buying new
CPUs anyway - which*will* help both Intel and Microsoft. If I weren't
an ardent wielder of Hanlon's razor...

Why would I not buy an AMD? For most of my use a top end ARM would
probably work too.

Andy

"Chronos" wrote

| Of course, now we have Meltdown and Spectre, you'll all be buying new
| CPUs anyway - which *will* help both Intel and Microsoft.

Who's you all? See the next topic up. Someone trying
to find a system with the newer type CPU on which
they can install Win7. So a new CPU might not be
a great solution. It's probably not a rational solution
for anyone. But I wouldn't be surprised if you read that
somewhere. The lapdog tech media is always happy
to run press releases that tell people they need to
buy new stuff.

And what's the problem? A rather
limited risk that anyone who doesn't bother with online
security, and buys stuff online with credit cards,
might possibly leave data exposed to hackers. You're
running more risk just by enabling script online.

Not to mention that the worse bug, meltdown,
is not an AMD problem. If people haven't stopped paying
through the nose for Intel by now, wouldn't this be
a good time to stop?

Brian Gregory wrote:
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 once saw the source code of a web browser written in assembler.
I still have nightmares.

It worked, it was fast, but it could not be maintained and was never updated
to later web standards.

Sooner or later you reach the limit of human ability...

Theo

On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote:
I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects.


Your impression is way off base. Believe it or not, operating systems
used to be written in assembler. And typically they needed teams of
people.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On 2018-01-19, Chris wrote:
I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices.

Nonsense. Plenty of operating systems have been written in assembler.
Do you think they were single-person projects? For that matter on early
computers applications were written in assembler (if not directly in
machine language) and they were not single-person projects either. I've
beein involved in such projects myself.

You must be very young and stoopid. (Don't worry, you'll probably
outgrow it.)

--
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Roger Blake (Posts from Google Groups killfiled due to excess spam.)

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In message , Theo
writes:
Brian Gregory wrote:
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 once saw the source code of a web browser written in assembler.
I still have nightmares.

It worked, it was fast, but it could not be maintained and was never updated
to later web standards.

Sooner or later you reach the limit of human ability...

Theo

Could not be maintained by - and the limit of ability of - a _single_
human, perhaps. A team, working on modules each, would have no problem
maintaining it.

Of course the splitting into modules, with properly-defined interfaces,
could be seen as an element of high-level language (-:.

(A browser might indeed be another category - along with video and
perhaps audio processing - where assembler coding could well yield
benefits. Though probably only parts of it [in the overall cost/returns
analysis].)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Gravity is a myth; the Earth sucks.

Stan Brown wrote:
On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 14:58:25 -0000 (UTC), Chris wrote:
I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible with
single-person projects.


Your impression is way off base. Believe it or not, operating systems
used to be written in assembler. And typically they needed teams of
people.


Understood. Thanks for the clarification.

"Chris" wrote

| I've never written assembler and my impression is it's only compatible
with
| single-person projects. It doesn't fit with modern programming practices.
|

I guess that will teach you not to engage in mild
speculation, after being roughly rebuked by no less
than 3 local porcupines.

(At least one of them has blacklisted me for
disagreeing with him once, a number of years ago.
Maybe we're all just getting too old and cranky
on usenet.)

I've only heard of single individuals using
assembly in recent times. It seems to be kind
of a hobby craft, like grinding one's own flour.
I once bought The Art of Assembly Language
by Randall Hyde, but then just couldn't see
the point in mastering something that simply
wasn't necessary.
Though I'm very grateful to one clever person
who mixes short lines of assembly with VB6
to produce very useful results, like the ability
to call CDECL functions that VB6 can't otherwise
handle. But I really don't understand the code
myself. If I had to go down to such a tedious
level to program, I never would have started.
(I also wouldn't bake bread if I needed a wheat
field and a windmill to do it.)

On the other hand, I'm self taught and could
probably never cooperate with a group myself.
I always understand "willing to be a team player"
as code for "expect to be an abused lackey if
you work at our company". So I guess I'm not
very modern myself.

Mayayana wrote:


On the other hand, I'm self taught and could
probably never cooperate with a group myself.
I always understand "willing to be a team player"
as code for "expect to be an abused lackey if
you work at our company". So I guess I'm not
very modern myself.

Don't knock a work dynamic, until you've tried it.

Paul