> Systems programming in any language would benefit immensely from better hardware accelerated bounds checking. [Mostly discussed deeper in the thread already

> Systems programming in any language would benefit immensely from better hardware accelerated bounds checking. [Mostly discussed deeper in the thread already but felt it was worth bringing up directly as a reply to this] This is an active area of development though still plenty of work to do. The Cambridge University Computer Lab have been doing research in this area in the form of CHERI: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri/ this gives you hardware capabilities which are effectively pointers with bounds given out by the OS. Want to access something? You need the appropriate capability to do so. ARM announced MTE last year, which whilst far less capable than CHERI begins to give you something (though it's targeted for bug hunting effectively rather than providing any actual security/safety properties): https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b/processors-ip-blog/posts/enhancing-memory-safety https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b... ARM are also building a hardware CHERI implementation, Morello: https://developer.arm.com/architectures/cpu-architecture/a-profile/morello https://developer.arm.com/architectures/cpu-architecture/a-p.... There's already CHERI implementations running BSD on FPGAs, this will take it to the next level with real silicon using modern ARM processors (maybe you could run android on it for instance?). I think Intel have been looking along similar lines but I'm far less in touch with what they're up to so I don't have links.