Shouldn't invalid references like this fail at compile time?

[Walter Bright]

On 1/24/2018 9:04 PM, Mike Franklin wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 January 2018 at 04:59:55 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
> 
>> Yes, ROM is at address 0.  Address 0 contains the initial stack pointer.  So 
>> you read address 0, dereference it, and then do your damage.

This is from the "what were they thinking" school of CPU design. Blargh.


> Keep in mind too that the ROM, on these devices, is actually reprogrammable from 
> the firmware itself, so one could do some clever exploitation of that feature to 
> insert whatever they want into the product's firmware.

I've posted online many times that people creating embedded systems should put 
the firmware in ROM, so malware will not survive a reset.

The riposte I get is the firmware must be rewritable from the internet in order 
to fix malware written to it from the internet :-)