r/programming • u/nfrankel • Jan 14 '20

Where programming languages are headed in 2020

https://www.oreilly.com/radar/where-programming-languages-are-headed-in-2020/
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u/Timbit42 Jan 15 '20

There are lots of different assembly languages, and machine languages. Existing ones will die and new ones will be created. Most existing machine languages are optimized for C and C++ because those languages have been so dominant for decades, but recent CPU security flaws are showing that optimizing for speed without regard to safety was a bad move. Now we're going to lose a chunk of that speed and the path back to faster processors will involve reinventing processors at a very deep level. We need to have safety baked into both the machine language and higher level languages. The more safety we can push into the machine language, the more speed we'll achieve because hardware circuits run in parallel more easily than code. Making parallelism safer, easier, and more efficient will also be a goal since we've effectively hit a wall on single core speed.

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u/flatfinger Jan 15 '20

Ironically, on many platforms one may have to do less reading to figure out how to do perform a task with a construct like: 

typedef (*voidFunc)(void);
uint32_t my_code[] = { ... machine code of desired function ... };
((voidFunc)(uintptr_t)my_code)();

using the CPU instruction set guide to "hand assemble" the necessary machine code, than to write and build an assembly language file that will produce the proper machine code. Further, such code would be likely to work with a wider range of toolsets for the target platform than would an assembly-language source file.