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إمي ❄️🏳️‍⚧️🇵🇸@emmy@transfem.social (2026-10-07 16:30:44)
My conclusion: optimizing compilers were a mistake.

RE: https://chaos.social/users/icing/statuses/117398069550473355
---Reply---
Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd@koakuma@uwu.social (2026-10-07 16:44:54)
@emmy I'd say it's even more fundamental: our programming interfaces are woefully underspecified wrt. the properties security folks are interested in

Take, say, timing attacks

People try so hard to avoid branches in their source code
But no, naughty compilers turn it into branchy code!

Now people try so hard to avoid branches by writing their own asm
But no, naughty processors run it in an indeterminate amount of clock cycles!

Now people try so hard to find sequences of instructions guaranteed to run in constant amount of clock cycles
But no, naughty DVFS makes it run in indeterminate amount of wall clock time

And so on :char_nachoneko_baa: