What is more frightening about this than safe C assembly is that this level of implementation is achievable not with a SOTA model, but with a cost effective model like KIMI. There was human judgment involved in the middle, but reading the article, My reading of the process is as follows:

1.A developer identified the necessity of inline assembly.

2.Defined the safety boundaries for 'memory-safe' inline assembly.

3.Established strict policies for memory access.

4.Curated an allowlist of permissible instructions.

5.Set rigorous test criteria and 'done' conditions.

In short, with the overall guardrails in place, a sub agent loop was run, and this level of code was produced. This raises a number of interesting points about how we should use AI. I haven't looked at all the code, but the idea of passing assembly through safe zones without memory access, and using that as a foundation to achieve this level of implementation through AI, is quite impressive

I wonder if an adversarial user could bypass the checks and achieve memory corruption / code execution. Maybe not a practical attack in most situations but a fun exercise.

> This includes things like asm volatile("" : : : "memory"), which is an old-school way of saying atomic_signal_fence(memory_order_seq_cst).

Not quite. AIUI, the first is just a barrier for the compiler, while the second is also a CPU memory barrier. Godbolt seems to confirm that.

https://godbolt.org/z/a844zKej8