3 ms·
I am astonished that HARDWARE does not help us much. When 'everybody' decided going like a bat-out-of-hell was more important that security and safety and easy
by GeorgeTirebiter 6y ago
I am astonished that HARDWARE does not help us much. When 'everybody' decided going like a bat-out-of-hell was more important that security and safety and easy-to-not-screw-up languages w/garbage collection and capabilities and hw-enforced typing and and ... we end up where we are: a mess that runs fast. And, specifically, I think that RISC-V rather missed the boat here, by not taking the security/safety banner and leading to a new way of building computer systems. Instead, we got a different (open) ARMish thing. Progress...
- lmm 6y agoPeople - or rather C compiler writers - don't even use the minimal safety capabilities that today's hardware has. Trapping NaNs? C is going to turn them off. Trap on null pointer dereference? The C compiler is going to optimize that away. Etc.
- pjmlp 6y agoThere are now efforts to turn computers into C Machines with hardware memory tagging. While Intel's MPX extensions were a failure, Solaris makes use of ADI on SPARC, iOS uses PAC, Google is researching adopting ARM MTE into Android, ARM sponsors CHERI with Morello project, Azure Sphere has Plutonium, and so forth. However these are all pontual efforts, and their large scale effects will take years or decades to start making a difference.
- xfer 6y agoCan you actually have a faster system with hardware checks compared to what we can do with x86 with all security checks in software? If not, I don't see the point. Noone is going to buy slower hardware that runs the same safe language(which we already have access to).
- pjmlp 6y agoYes, Solaris SPARC with ADI for example.