2014-12-15 16:55 GMT-02:00 Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com>:

On Monday, 15 December 2014 at 16:30:14 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

Any thoughts on how the upcoming hardware supported bounds checking from Intel will affect D?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MPX

Chapter 9 in:

https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/0d/53/319433-022.pdf

Interesting, given that bounds checking support is an old feature

http://x86.renejeschke.de/html/file_module_x86_id_18.html

If I remember my Assembly days in the 90's BOUND was slower than doing the check explicitly.

I guess now it is way faster and the MMU is doing it instead.

Actually, MPX provides a complete infra-structure for bounds-checking, including special-purpose registers (4 of them), a bounds directory/tables for storing/loading linearized pointer addresses, specific instructions to independently make/check upper/lower bounds, and even modified versions of call/ret/jump.

They are working in the ABI level so calling conventions can benefit from it. Although MPX currently supports only statically allocated arrays, a memory-protected version of glibc is on the way: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/07/22/intel-memory-protection-extensions-intel-mpx-support-in-the-gnu-toolchain

I've tried out the MPX-enabled GCC version and it looks pretty cool.

Leandro