Demystifying magic
Daniel Frampton, Stephen Michael Blackburn, Perry C. Cheng, Robin J. Garner, David Grove, J. Eliot B. Moss, Sergey I. Salishev · 2009
The power of high-level languages lies in their abstraction over hardware and software complexity, leading to greater security, better reliability, and lower development costs. However, opaque abstractions are often show-stoppers for systems programmers, forcing them to either break the abstraction, or more often, simply give up and use a different language. This paper addresses the challenge of opening up a high-level language to allow practical low-level programming without forsaking integrity or performance.