Wow, this is fascinating stuff. Just a side question (and please understand I am not a low-level hardware expert, so pardon me if this is a stupid question): does this arch support any sort of speculative execution, and if so do you have any sort of concerns and/or protections in place against the sort of vulnerabilities that seem to come inherent with that?
Right now, PyXL runs fully in-order with no speculative execution.
This is intentional for a couple of reasons:
First, determinism is really important for real-time and embedded systems — avoiding speculative behavior makes timing predictable and eliminates a whole class of side-channel vulnerabilities.
Second, PyXL is still at an early stage — the focus right now is on building a clean, efficient architecture that makes sense structurally, without adding complex optimizations like speculation just for the sake of performance.
In the future, if there's a clear real-world need, limited forms of prediction could be considered — but always very carefully to avoid breaking predictability or simplicity.
