alt Hacker News> Most modern processors (if we ignore x86) support some form of sticky arithmetic flags. Unfortunately, programming languages don’t support them, so they aren’t used.
I'd say the reason that programming languages don't have built-in support for checking the CPU's sticky status flags is precisely because of a lack of x86 support. Plenty of languages do have support for checking overflow on each individual operation, e.g. Rust's `overflowing_foo` methods, which return a tuple whose second member is a boolean indicating overflow: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.i32.html#method.over...
Sticky flags tend to be really annoying for a compiler to support for various reasons, but principally it makes every operation have a hidden dependency to shared global state that is almost never read. Note that IEEE 754 standardized support for sticky flags 40 years ago, but support for these sticky bits is still poor to nonexistent in most programming languages, and sticky bit stuff for floating-point operations is less problematic than integer operations because FP math is already far more black box in practice.