[Voultapher]

A couple points:

- CPU memory subsystems are very complex these days and represent a lot of shared mutable micro-architectural state, which makes it hard to reason about. That's not linear and the C language does not offer concepts which represent that complexity. Short of some prefetching intrinsics.

- Pretty much all memory will be virtually addressed, pushing you even further from the concept of flat linear memory.

- Pointer provenance [0] binds memory to types and allocations which doesn't map onto the concept of linear memory and a pointer is just an offset.

[0] https://faultlore.com/blah/fix-rust-pointers/

[jstimpfle]

AFAIK C's machine model is not that linear (see my other comment). On the other hand, what most CPUs offer as an abstraction (through their instruction set) is very much so.

There are couple of arguments like that floating around and it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The C model is in fact a usable abstraction (and easy enough to peel off when required), otherwise it wouldn't have stuck around for so long. No amount of "network effects" and "free beer" arguments can discuss this away.

There is an argument that instruction sets might have developped a linear address space abstraction because of C, but I doubt it. Binding the IR closer to a specific physical layout would be very bad for portability and longevity of the code.