> Show me somebody who calls the IBM S/360 a RISC design, and I will show you somebody who works with the s390 instruction set today.
Ahaha so true.
But to answer the post's main question:
> Why do we even have linear physical and virtual addresses in the first place, when pretty much everything today is object-oriented?
Because backwards compatibility is more valuable than elegant designs. Because array-crunching performance is more important than safety. Because a fix for a V8 vulnerability can be quickly deployed while a hardware vulnerability fix cannot. Because you can express any object model on top of flat memory, but expressing one object model (or flat memory) in terms of another object model usually costs a lot. Because nobody ever agreed of what the object model should be. But most importantly: because "memory safety" is not worth the costs.
Ahaha so true.
But to answer the post's main question:
> Why do we even have linear physical and virtual addresses in the first place, when pretty much everything today is object-oriented?
Because backwards compatibility is more valuable than elegant designs. Because array-crunching performance is more important than safety. Because a fix for a V8 vulnerability can be quickly deployed while a hardware vulnerability fix cannot. Because you can express any object model on top of flat memory, but expressing one object model (or flat memory) in terms of another object model usually costs a lot. Because nobody ever agreed of what the object model should be. But most importantly: because "memory safety" is not worth the costs.