It was our last best hope for peace...

[P T Withington]

On 10/7/98 13:09, Kragen wrote:

>http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?98106.ecjavachip.htm

Sun's experience seems to mirror Symbolics':  they've built a CPU as big 
as a Pentium with less than 1/2 the horsepower.  I'm surprised that they 
couldn't do better.

>Looks like pointer security etc. in hardware is dead for a while,
>again.
>
>I suspect that pointer security in general will make a comeback,
>though.  As applications get bigger, programmers get more expensive,
>software gets cheaper, and CPUs get faster, it will become more and
>more appealing.  (Lots of the folks here have found it appealing for
>decades, of course -- who wants to go implement ad hoc memory
>management for every program they write?  Or fight with SIGSEGV?)

I keep hoping.  But it seems it isn't going to happen until customers 
demand it or the government legislates it.  Unfortunately few people can 
make the connection that "General Protection Fault" means "your software 
vendor should be using a garbage collector".  Perhaps more fortunately, 
too few people have died due to wild references for the government to 
feel compelled to legislate better security.