D vs. C#

[Christopher Wright]

Julio César Carrascal Urquijo wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> I've never been able to discover what the fundamental advantage of a 
>> VM is.
> 
> The only advantage a VM has over native code that I see is security. I'm 
>  not talking about this process can't write memory of another process.
> 
> I'm talking about this process can't write to the hard disk, only to 
> Isolated Storage; but this one can because it's signed by a Thawte 
> certificate and the VM.

This policy should be carried out at the operating system level for any 
reasonable assurance of security.

> This is a lot more than disallowing pointer arithmetic. I'm not aware of 
> any compiled language that has managed to do this.

C + SELinux? If your language doesn't have a VM, the VM can't check any 
certificates, only the OS. The reverse is not true -- your OS can check 
VM-bound applications' certificates, depending on how VM applications 
are launched and whether the VM cooperates.

Though in SELinux, you don't have certificates; you have a complex set 
of permissions, essentially, that some really dedicated person has to 
come up with.

> On the other hand, most .NET developers ignore CAS (Code Access 
> Security) in their apps, so it doesn't seem like a great advantage anyway.

Nobody uses SELinux, either, so that's okay.