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The article addresses the subject of standardization of software memory safety, which is a critical step toward its widespread adoption across government, industry, and academia. The authors suggest that this effort necessitates a technology-neutral framework defining memory safety principles, best practices, and technical mappings to guide diverse use cases, including emerging secure IoT and cloud infrastructures. Goals include establishing tiered safety assurance levels, addressing the integration of memory-safe technologies with legacy systems, and enabling compositional reasoning about safety in heterogeneous environments. Collaboration among stakeholders—including educators, regulatory bodies, and industry leaders—is essential to create actionable guidelines that promote gradual transitions and interoperability while addressing industry concerns about cost and disruption. By defining clear standards, memory safety can evolve into a universally adopted practice, improving the security and reliability of critical systems worldwide.

This article discusses the intricacies of designing instruction set architectures (ISAs), emphasizing their crucial role as a lingua franca between compilers and microarchitecture. It highlights the importance of optimizing ISAs for different source languages and microarchitectures, addressing trade-offs between encoding efficiency, instruction density, and microarchitectural complexity. The author argues against oversimplified beliefs that ISAs don't matter much compared to microarchitecture, stressing that a well-designed ISA can significantly impact performance and power consumption, particularly in complex cores. Additionally, the article explores how certain ISAs, like RISC-V, make design choices that impact emulation and compatibility with legacy software, underscoring the challenges and trade-offs inherent in ISA design.

The memory-safe Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) C and C++ languages build on architectural capabilities in the CHERI protection model. With the development of two industrial CHERI-enabled processors, Arm’s Morello and Microsoft’s CHERIoT, CHERI may offer the fastest path to widely deployed memory safety.

The article examines efforts being made to establish confidential cloud computing. It discusses the ability of computer hardware to provide a trusted execution environment (TEE), the concept of dynamic TEE implementation, and confidential virtual machines (VMs).

Over the past decade I've been involved in several projects that have designed either ISA (instruction set architecture) extensions or clean-slate ISAs for various kinds of processors (you'll even find my name in the acknowledgments for the RISC-V spec, right back to the first public version). When I started, I had very little idea about what makes a good ISA, and, as far as I can tell, this isn't formally taught anywhere. With the rise of RISC-V as an open base for custom instruction sets, however, the barrier to entry has become much lower and the number of people trying to design some or all of an instruction set has grown immeasurably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the root causes of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Topics include the false belief that the C computer programming language was a low-level language, processors' reliance on instruction-level parallelism, and the need for a processor designed purely for speed that would support a large number of threads, have wide vector units, and have a simpler memory model.

The whole story starts with light--or, rather, with Newton's first experiments on light in the seventeenth century. After Newton, physics was confounded with seemingly contradictory results until the mid-twentieth century, […]

The article examines the argument that there is no such thing as a truly general-purpose processor and that the belief in such a device is harmful. Topics discussed include the specific category of workloads that the devices are optimized for and what those optimizations are, requirements for running an operating system and the problem of dark silicon or the portion of a chip that must be left unpowered. The article also explores parallelism in software, central processing unit (CPU) cache and RISC I processor.

The article discusses the challenge of interoperability between computer programming languages as of December 2013. It highlights the increase in difficulty of ensuring interoperability due to the increase in software complexity and decline in homogeneity among computer hardware products. The author says that at present the division between high-level languages and low-level languages no longer applies. The growing prevalence of domain-specific computer programming languages is also mentioned. Features and applications of object-oriented languages are also highlighted.

The article describes the development and production of Objective-C computer programming language implementation runtime system for use with the Étoilé open source software project. Particular focus is given to the emphasis on backward compatibility with other programming languages. Topics include the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) software released by the the Free Software Foundation, application binary interface (API) between software and operating systems, and the creation and modification of method lookup functions.