
Everything Old Is New Again, and a Compiler Bug - AndreyKarpov
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2016/09/16/everything-old-is-new-again-and-a-compiler-bug/
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The author of the article is obviously very experienced and extremely
talented. Personally, I find it a tragedy that he is wasting his time on
Windows, on a platform, which in his own words, _in the crazy world of Windows
there are a lot of programs that think that injecting their DLLs into all
processes is a good idea. Whether malware or anti-malware or something else
these injected DLLs end up causing a good portion of all of Chrome’s crashes.
And in this case one of these injected DLLs decided that changing the FPU
exception flags in somebody else’s process was a good idea._

 _The fld instruction is part of the x87 FPU and it loads a floating-point
value onto the x87’s peculiar eight-register stack, so it seems initially
plausible that it could have caused a FLT_STACK check._

 _Who designs a stack with just eight entries? Intel. It must have seemed like
a good idea at the time._

Not to mention something those of us who grew up on Motorola MOS 6502,
MC68000, SPARC, UltraSPARC and MIPS families always knew: intel might be
really fast now, but under the hood, the architecture was and still is really,
really shoddy. It's covered up by raw speed, but woe to one if they have to
work with things "under the hood".

I chuckled, half in amusement and half in grotesque disgust, when I read the
bit about the stack with only eight entries, because the first thing I thought
of when I read that was of UltraSPARC and register windows, effectively giving
one 256 stacks by means of i0-i7 and o0-o7 registers (which in reality are
part of the r0-r31 physical registers). I'm kind of comparing apples to
oranges, but the difference in design approaches is striking. What a contrast!
intel designers were always bad, even from the very first 4004, through 8008
to 8086. Their two shots at making things right, the i960 and Itanium RISC
processors were both epic failures. They are so bad at designing _clean,
elegant architectures_ , that a competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, had to
implement 64-bit extensions on _their_ processors, and then intel had to
license that from them.

How much longer is intel going to be _the_ mainstream, I wonder? Is there any
will for change of the status quo?

