Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack)

Posted Nov 4, 2023 19:19 UTC (Sat) by jem (subscriber, #24231)
In reply to: Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack) by khim
Parent article: Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack)

The "portable assembler" term comes from its usage as the output format from various compilers. Compilers traditionally (at least on Unix-type operating systems) do not produce an object file directly, but they output an assembly file, which of course is processor specific. By instead producing a C source file as output, and relying on the C compilers on the target machines as a "portable assembler", you don't need to write a separate backend for each of the target machines.

Bjarne Stroustrup’s Plan for Bringing Safety to C++ (The New Stack)

Posted Nov 5, 2023 8:33 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Maybe some, indeed, call C a “portable assembler” for this reason, but most O_PONIES lovers have different meaning in mind: “I use C to create a machine code only because using assembler is too tedious thus I should be able to use any tricks that machine code can employ and that's why “portable assembler” is good name”.

When faced with “insane” examples which optimizers always broke (like I cook up) they have many different reactions, but mostly of “I don't write such an insane code thus I don't care” form.

Which, essentially, reduces the whole thing to the following, completely unconstructive definition: something may be called “portable assembler” when it includes optimizations that work fine on my programs and can not be called “portable assembler” when it includes optimizations that break my programs.

And as you may guess that approach doesn't scale: how may compiler writers know which code you consider “insane” and which code you consider “sane” if there are no definition?