[pizlonator]

I don’t think that beefier cpu and overflow checks are that related. I mean, you’re right, I just want to place some limits on how right you are.

1. Folks totally run JS and other crazy on small CPUs.

2. Other safe languages (rust and swift I think?) also use overflow checks. It’s probably a good thing if those languages get used more on small cpus.

3. The C code that normally runs on small cpus is hella vulnerable today and probably for a long time to come. Compiling with sanitizer flags that turn on overflow checks is a valuable (and oft requested) mitigation. So theres a future where most arithmetic is checked on all cpus and with all languages.

And yeah, it’s true that the overflow check is well predicted. And yeah, it’s true that what arm and x86 do here isn’t the best thing ever, just better than risc-v.

[spacenick88]

Interestingly it seems rust only does full overflow checking in debug builds: https://huonw.github.io/blog/2016/04/myths-and-legends-about...

[masklinn]

By default yes, but you can enable overflow checking in release mode (it’s a conf / compiler flag), and it has standard functions for checked, wrapping, and saturating ops.

[spacenick88]

Yeah I know about 1 e.g. also MicroPython, no idea if that's used outside DIY though. I agree about rust but I would think that with much stronger type safety and static compilation it should be able to remove a lot more of the overflow checks and most that remain would be needed in correct C too. At least that's what I learned from my compilers prof who worked on Ada compilers for many years and that should be quite similar. But maybe that's my biased hope as I really really hate working with dynamic languages.