Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
Wed, 13 Aug 2003
Vault and Cyclone
I'm sure that many of us spent some of today playing tech support due to the W32.Blaster worm. Aside from all the usual commentary on this, I'd like to point out a pair of projects:
Vault is a Microsoft Research project to provide a safe version of C.
Cyclone is joint project between Cornell and AT&T Labs to do the same.
There are also some OS level technques for dealing with buffer-overrun problems. How many more incidents like this will it take to push something like Vault or Cyclone into mainstream use as a replacement for C. Why aren't the Vault tools written as plugins for Visual Studio? This time around, we lucked out because whoever wrote W32.Blaster didn't do a good job. But if it had been written more like Slammer? It's too bad we can't send the wasted time invoice to Microsoft. We could all probably get enough to pay for our Windows licenses.
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4 Comments |
What's also interesting is that Vault allows for resource tracking. Note that Ruby already allows for something similar with its closures, but the idea of a safe C with resource tracking is indeed interesting.
That being said, with C# becoming the de facto standard on Windows, projects like Vault are doomed to remain in a niche.
Who cares about memory layout any more? :-)
--
Cedric
http://beust.com/weblog
Posted by Cedric at Wed Aug 13 07:48:08 2003
That being said, with C# becoming the de facto standard on Windows, projects like Vault are doomed to remain in a niche.
Who cares about memory layout any more? :-)
--
Cedric
http://beust.com/weblog
Posted by Cedric at Wed Aug 13 07:48:08 2003
What's also interesting is that Vault allows for resource tracking. Note that Ruby already allows for something similar with its closures, but the idea of a safe C with resource tracking is indeed interesting.
That being said, with C# becoming the de facto standard on Windows, projects like Vault are doomed to remain in a niche.
Who cares about memory layout any more? :-)
--
Cedric
http://beust.com/weblog
Posted by Cedric at Wed Aug 13 08:28:32 2003
That being said, with C# becoming the de facto standard on Windows, projects like Vault are doomed to remain in a niche.
Who cares about memory layout any more? :-)
--
Cedric
http://beust.com/weblog
Posted by Cedric at Wed Aug 13 08:28:32 2003
I agree that for many applications, C# or Java are more than suitable. But for systems level stuff, C or C++ are not going to go away. As long as we have them, we ought to at least use something that makes it hard to write buffer overruns. I doubt that the device drivers in Longhorn will be written in C#.
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Aug 13 10:55:06 2003
Posted by Ted Leung at Wed Aug 13 10:55:06 2003
Did your computer treat you to a window saying it will shutdown in 60 seconds? w32.blaster.worm is probably the culprit. Ted Leung discusses how Microsoft could have avoided it and Bieslog (dutch) tells the story from the user's point of...
Posted by Trackback from Dutch guy speaking English at Thu Aug 14 02:07:21 2003
Posted by Trackback from Dutch guy speaking English at Thu Aug 14 02:07:21 2003
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