2026 Computer Science Predictions

A set of five technical predictions for 2026 covering: (1) CXL-backed tiered memory becoming a cloud offering as RAM prices rise and the Linux kernel matures its memory tiering support; (2) a coordinated lunar time standard being officially published, driven by general relativity making moon-time drift from Earth-time; (3) CHERI (Cherry) capability-based hardware memory safety gaining traction as a hardware-level alternative to rewriting codebases in Rust; (4) a major package repository like npm being forced to shut down registrations due to AI-assisted supply chain attacks and 'slop squatting'; and (5) LLVM adding a third ML-guided optimization heuristic, making compiler output non-deterministic at maximum optimization levels.