[cap-talk] Concrete application, WebCVOS (was: Selling capabilities programming)

[Mark Miller]

On 7/18/07, Jed Donnelley <capability at webstart.com> wrote:
> [...] (may have to take over a bit to
> get what amounts to a hardware VMM - let
> me leave the details of that out for now)
> [...]
> This is much like a Java sandbox, but it
> isn't Java (real hardware instructions),
> [...]
> I don't see much difficulty in developing
> Window and/or Unix compatibility libraries
> that would run in this environment and
> make much of their respective environments
> appear to be there.  To me this is a bit
> like the libraries that support cygwin
> or any other compatibility package.

Hi Jed,

I like most aspects of your scenario. But by proposing to execute
hardware machine instructions, rather than leveraging portable
memory-safe language technology, I think you've made everything
several times harder. Web apps are already written in portable memory
safe languages (Javascript, Actionscript/Flash, Java), so starting
from there, there's no entrenched installed base of machine code
forcing us to do something ugly.

If you still think it doesn't seem that hard, how are you going to
intercept all OS traps on Windows without cooperation from Microsoft?
AFAIK, there's no ptrace equivalent exposed to Windows programmers.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

    Cheers,
    --MarkM