I can just see an OS go into a wait state now while the VM/.NET or whatever does garbage collection; and the delays while the intermediate code is turned into executable code by the loaders.
Not! HLL have given us portability (witness - *nix) but at some price of performance. The HW development has outpaced SW development - to the tune where we hardly notice the performance hit at all. After all, now fast can one person type (grin)? It's always a trade off... HW/SW. Mike Hines ----------------------------------- Michael S Hines [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Blue Boar Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2004 11:11 AM To: Peter Amey Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [SC-L] ACM Queue article and security education Peter Amey wrote: > There are languages which are more suitable for the construction of > high-integrity systems and have been for years. We could have > adopted Modula-2 back in the 1980s, people could take the blinkers of > prejudice off and look properly at Ada. Yet we continue to use > C-derived languages with known weaknesses. So we trade the known problems for a set of unknown ones? It might be appropriate to do so; C may be "broken" enough that it's better to go for an unknown with a design that allows for a possible correct implementation. I keep thinking of Java, for example. It's a good paper design for security purposes (I'll leave functionality alone for now.) But there are still all the issues with the VM implementation and libraries to deal with. Language X may very well be a much better starting point, I don't know. I do believe that it will never be properly looked at until the whole world starts using it for everything, though. BB
