Programming Language Design and Analysis Motivated by Hardware Evolution

Abstract. Silicon chip design has passed a threshold whereby exponentially increasing transistor density (Moore’s Law) no longer translates into increased processing power for single-processor architectures. Moore’s Law now expresses itself as an exponentially increasing number of processing cores per fixed-size chip. We survey this process and its implications on programming language design and static analysis. Particular aspects addressed include the reduced reliability of ever-smaller components, the problems of physical distribution of programs and the growing problems of providing shared memory. 1 Hardware Background Twenty years ago (1985 to be more precise) it was all so easy—processors and matching implementation languages were straightforward. The 5-stage pipeline of MIPS or SPARC was well established, the 80386 meant that the x86 architecture was now also 32-bit, and memory (DRAM) took 1–2 cycles to access. Moreover ANSI were in the process of standardising C which p...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SAS
• Authors: Alan Mycroft
• Keywords: Exponentially Increasing, Formal Methods, Moore’s Law, SAS 2007, Silicon Chip Design