On 22 feb 2006, at 11:26, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
I don't think there are many host OS'es out there which e.g. only
run signed applications. The fact is that for some purposes, none
of the current OS'es "does its job correctly" in that sense. Just
use the right tool for the job, I personally don't understand all
this hostility against managed environments (except as a reaction
against claims that they are always much better than unmanaged
environments, but overdoing it in the other direction isn't going
to get the discussion anywhere).
Well, the very idea of a program running in a managed environment
which by
itself is also a managed environment seems like a waste of resources.
The environments have different management capabilities. The OS
manages the hardware and provides an interface between the hardware
and the software. These managed environments pure manage software.
They don't have a compatibility scourge to deal with, and therefore
can break paradigms which are widely in use but which are inherently
insecure (such as pointers) or which make programs unverifiable (self-
modifying code, data-in-code and code-in data, code flow which is
impossible to determine etc).
Secondly, too many links in the chain makes it easier for the chain
to break...
I don't think a managed environment is easier to break than in case
you try to stuff all those things in an already existing environments.
The advantage of running 'signed' applications also eludes me. Even
so,
provided you really want that, you could easily integrate that in
the OS,
without having a new managed environment...
Then you have to integrate it in every OS, bolting it on on
structures which were never designed for such things. It can be much
safer and sometimes even easier to start from scratch and build
something from the ground up which was made for this purpose. A bit
like the difference between adapting Turbo Pascal into a 32/64 bit
retargettable compiler (I wonder whether Borland wouldn't have
advanced faster if they started Delphi from scratch rather than
reusing stuff from TP in the beginning) and starting Free Pascal
(should that have been a possible choice back in the days).
Jonas
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
