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 @01:47AM (#18173604)

Multics had almost nonexistent buffer overflow exploits in a security analysis thanks to its implementation in PL/I.

Ironic how its descendant didn't managed to replicate that feature.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by scns on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @03:01AM (#18173861)

If i remember correctly multics needed ram worth 500000$ to run.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by pjmlp on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @03:23AM (#18173946)

I doubt other mainframes were much cheaper, even PDP-11 wasn't properly a bargain.

Also Burroughs B5000, developed in 1961, already took security as major OS feature.

The problem is that UNIX designers never took security as serious as other OS designers were doing on their OS implementations.

Had UNIX been a commercial OS sold at the same price levels as VMS, OS/360 and others, instead of given to universities with a symbolic price due to Bell Labs commercial restrictions and history would have been quite different.

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Re:The benefits and costs of writing a POSIX kernel in a hig... by jacobush on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:51AM (#18174541)

Yes. No widespread adoption of Unix for instance. :)

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