[5976] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: How about a Safe Virtual Machine?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl)
Sun Oct 2 05:39:35 1994
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 1994 10:37:53 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
From: Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
> Has anyone looked at the virtual machine that GNU is planning toi use
> for the C interpreter? I hear it can already run programs compiled
> by GNU C et al.
>
> I quite like forth, but has anyone done any work compiling
> things like C into it? It is possible, I'm sure, but
> I wonder if it works well.
Hm... I think the whole idea of a "safe virtual machine" won't work.
As Nathaniel points out, the operations that need to be verified or
confirmed (etc.) are usually at a much higher level of abstraction.
When thinking (as a result of this discussion) about making Python
safe, maybe 95% of the unsafe operations are library functions -- 4%
are high-level operations that negotiate access to the library
(e.g. importing modules); only a tiny fraction of unsafe operations
are close to the level of the Python virtual machine (such as object
attributes that provide read-write access to internals of the
interpreter).
--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <mailto:Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>
<http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Guido.van.Rossum.html>
