[Not really OT] Crowdstrike Analysis: It was a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 26/07/2024 6:57 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> It did crash the computers. But AFAIK, nobody said any data was 
> corrupted or lost.
> 
> Without hardware memory protection, this could have been much much worse.

Yes as a fallback it did potentially prevent corrupting the kernel 
silently and that is a good thing!

No arguments against the MMU acting in this way.

However where we are differing is not that the MMU did good, but that it 
is a fallback.

If the MMU is throwing an exception something has gone terribly wrong 
elsewhere and having a programming language force you to check for null 
is a reasonable precaution against this.

There is a reason why application VM languages have over the last 15 
years been adopting such analysis. They may control the process & 
threads, but even then it still makes sense to prevent such errors.