[taeric]

But why do we think that? The complexity would almost certainly still exist. Would just now be up a layer. With no guarantees that you could hit the same performance characteristics that we are able to hit today.

Put another way, if that would truly be a better place, what is stopping people from building it today?

[layer8]

Performance wouldn’t be the same, and that’s why nobody is manufacturing it. The industry prefers living with higher complexity when it yields better performance. That doesn’t mean that some people like in this thread wouldn’t prefer if things were more simple, even at the price of significantly lower performance.

> The complexity would almost certainly still exist.

That doesn’t follow. A lot of the complexity is purely to achieve the performance we have.

[taeric]

I'm used to people arguing for simpler setups because the belief is that they could make them more performant. This was specifically the push for RISC back in the day, no?

To that end, I was assuming the idea would be that we think we could have faster systems if we didn't have this stuff. If that is not the assumption, I'm curious what the appeal is?

[layer8]

That’s certainly not the assumption here. The appeal is, as I said, that the systems would be more predictable and tractable, instead of being a tarpit of complexity. It would be easier to reason about them, and about their runtime characteristics. Side-channel attacks wouldn’t be a thing, or at least not as much. Nowadays it’s rather difficult to reason about the runtime characteristics of code on modern CPUs, about what exactly will be going on behind the scenes. More often than not, you have to resort to testing how specific scenarios will behave, rather than being able to predict the general case.

[taeric]

I guess I don't know that I understand why you would dream of this, though? Just go out and program on some simpler systems? Retro computing makes the rounds a lot and is perfectly doable.