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Intel x86 considered harmful – survey of attacks against x86 over last 10 years

(blog.invisiblethings.org)
276 points chei0aiV | 1 comments | 27 Oct 15 14:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.421s | source
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n0us ◴[27 Oct 15 15:13 UTC] No.10458463[source]▶
I really could do without "considered harmful" titles. x86 has been one of the most influential technologies of all time and a clickbait title doesn't do it justice imo.
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wyager ◴[27 Oct 15 15:41 UTC] No.10458692[source]▶
So were PHP and goto statements.

How influential something is has nothing to do with how good it is.

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vezzy-fnord ◴[27 Oct 15 15:43 UTC] No.10458720[source]▶
goto is just a mnemonic for jmp. It's the primitive from which all higher level control flow is ultimately derived. It isn't harmful, and it's used a lot even in C.
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mortehu ◴[27 Oct 15 16:34 UTC] No.10459151[source]▶
> [goto] is the primitive from which all higher level control flow is ultimately derived

I'm pretty sure you cannot implement conditional branches using unconditional branches as a building block. Unless you count indirect branches, which goto usually doesn't support.

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1. taeric ◴[27 Oct 15 17:03 UTC] No.10459382[source]▶
Not that I'd recommend it, but sure you can. Just allow modification of the code to include where you want to jump to. :)

Scarily enough, I think this used to actually be somewhat common place and is why many functions were not reentrant.