[cap-talk] Security and languages talk

[Rob Meijer]

On Mon, May 5, 2008 11:20, Matej Kosik wrote:
> Hi Ivan,
>
> I do not know how much my point of view matters but here it is:
> (I am sorry for the length)
>
> Ivan Krstić napísal:
>> I'm directing much of my recently-gained spare time[0] towards a few
>> things I've wanted to work on for a while, but haven't had the time in
>> the course of my breakneck two years with OLPC. One such thing is,
>> after giving a bunch of high-profile talks about systems security,
>> writing a short one about security and programming languages.
>>
>> The Boston Lisp folks invited me to give the talk[1] on May 27th, so
>> the audience is a fairly clueful programming crowd without any
>> necessary prior exposure to language security and capability ideas.
>> I'll be talking for 25 minutes: covering the basic ideas and looking
>> briefly at things like E, Joe-E, Caja and CaPerl.
>
> Most (all?) object-capability languages are at present in a deadlock. They
> will be used when they
> become useful and they will be useful when they become used (because
> people will find (and fix?)
> bugs, contribute with libraries, create awsome programs that will attract
> other developers. How to
> break this deadlock is an interesting question. Certainly, even if these
> ideas are great, they will
> not spread autonomously because the net-effect of the legacy is too
> strong.

A very annoying problem with regular languages today is with
interoperability.There really isn't a good way to couple OO components
written in different languages, not to mention trying to do the same
using ocap languages.
This field of interoperability might be a good way to potentially break
the deadlock. It seems that creating an ocap based IPC mechanism that
focuses
on coupling the different languages as much as local or distributed
components written in the same language, may make each of the languages
much more useful, just by creating a way to combine for example perly with
java-ish code in a natural and ocap compliant way.

Rob