The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a high-level language

Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by pjmlp on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @01:45AM (#18173592)

AT&T made Cyclone as C replacement, GCC has an extension for decades, MSVC++ has had pointer coherency debug libraries, SPARC has hardware validation for pointers.

There are many other examples of people trying to band aid and improve C's security history.

The biggest problem is that the developers that are supposed to actually adopt those practices don't really care, because performance trumps security.

Those that actually care end up moving to C++, or some other language, so we end up with this selection bias.

Thankfully they are being forced to change, as being 100% connected to the Internet does wonders to security.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by _qjt0 on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @03:10AM (#18182648)

Interesting. Regarding developers not caring about security, that's why I suggested it should be the default, with an option to turn it off for performance or other reasons, rather than the other way around.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by pjmlp on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @07:05AM (#18183721)

Agreed, however that is against the culture of those that decide to stick with C no matter what.

Secure by default with option to turn those features off for performance, has been the way other systems programming languages have been designed since 1961.

That C culture is now being forced to change, because fixing memory corruption CVEs in devices that are permanently under security exploits attacks does not scale.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by kartickv on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @08:57AM (#18184385)

Interesting perspective; thanks for sharing.

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