[cap-talk] C-like Capability language

[James A. Donald]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
 > My confusion stems from the fact that you haven't
 > really answered my question about capabilities.
 > Broadly speaking, you seem to be talking about
 > type-safe and memory-safe runtimes. These don't
 > require any special support for capabilities, because
 > object references are already capabilities. You could
 > place various *restrictions* on the VM layer, but
 > these restrictions can equally well be enforced in a
 > bytecode verifier, and you probably want to keep the
 > VM per se as general as possible. Still, my main point
 > is that your goal of "a lowish level bytecode VM that
 > enforced capabilities and was high level language
 > agnostic" is satisfied by any type-safe runtime.

Bytecode has significant performance costs.

Plus there is a huge amount of software in C, most of it
woefully insecure, that is *not* going to move to a
managed code environment.