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Wow, had no idea WinRAR contained a mini-VM. Cool, weird and maybe slightly disconcerting
by wamatt 14y ago
Wow, had no idea WinRAR contained a mini-VM. Cool, weird and maybe slightly disconcerting
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIt's funny, so does Bitcoin, Adobe Reader, a lot of things. Maybe we need to rewrite that old law: All programs expand until they contain a virtual machine. Those that cannot do so are replaced by ones that can.
- runn1ng 14y agoWhat does Bitcoin do with virtual machine? (If you don't take "running the bitcoin script" as "virtual machine".... then yes, it is technically a virtual machine, but very Turing incomplete.)
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoYes, I meant the script. Not turing complete, sure, but still quite flexible.
- T-hawk 14y agoGreenspun's Rule basically covers that. Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. Although nowadays the art of programming is maturing enough that the inner platform sometimes is deliberately designed and well specified.
- Torn 14y agoYeah would it be possible to have a .rar containing some VM instructions (maybe pulling data from a payload within the archive) that would automatically execute upon unzipping?
- StavrosK 14y agoYes. That's exactly what unzipping (or, well, unrarring) does.