MELF: Multivariant Executables for a Heterogeneous World

Re:MELF: Multivariant Executables for a Heterogeneous World by api on Saturday July 15, 2023 @11:45AM (#36737866)

I’d love to see what you describe take root, but with probably over a trillion dollars worth of software sunk cost in current systems I find it deeply unlikely unless porting could be automated.

The great satan of computing is backward compatibility. It’s almost always why we can’t have nice things.

Otherwise you are confined to greenfield projects only, and to only the subset of the project that is greenfield.

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Re:MELF: Multivariant Executables for a Heterogeneous World by vacuity on Saturday July 15, 2023 @05:15PM (#36741016)

I wonder if there's a 90% compatible POSIX subset that's easier to get people to adopt. Like they say, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. We have to do stuff and hope they work out, not twiddle our thumbs waiting for the cruft to go away. I know that's easier said than done though.

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Re:MELF: Multivariant Executables for a Heterogeneous World by mikewarot on Sunday July 16, 2023 @05:31PM (#36751593)

It seems that almost all of the functions in the POSIX library[1] assume authority do do things with the file system, threads, time, etc. This is exactly the wrong thing to give to code if you care about security. It would be a non-trivial job to fake all these calls, and tie them into PowerBoxes, etc.

[1] https://en.kompf.de/cplus/posixlist.html

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