Is such a safe implementation of C really suitable for systems programming, rather than merely application programming? If we understand system-building as comm

Is such a safe implementation of C really suitable for systems programming, rather than merely application programming? If we understand system-building as communicativity, then certainly such a system retains communicativity—so long as alien objects can be described to it in a manner sufficient for dispatching the same dynamic checks. If I memory-map a file, say, I can safely access that memory only if the structure and meaning—the bounds and the types, roughly—are described much like those of other in-memory objects. Tools and systems for providing these descriptions are currently lacking—but are a logical extension of the runtime type information already developed in recent work. In the case of file formats, some cases like the ELF example we saw earlier (§5.5) show that the format has already been defined for us, thanks to the manifest layout of objects declared in C. This is a key point. There are scattered systems for describing the layout of arbitrary binary data—C structs/unions, Erlang binary patterns, ASN.1 Encoding Control Notation, Kaitai Struct[1]—but nothing has really caught on across language boundaries. It's hard not to feel this data format barrier when you're using a C API from another language. We'll need to do something about this barrier if we want a true multi-language system (not just a bunch of awkward C FFIs). [1] http://kaitai.io/ http://kaitai.io/