Esthetics (or worse?) of Secure Pointers

[Greg McGary]

Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org> writes:

> John  eventually convinced me that there's no way to decide
> at compile time what a subfunction's boundedness is. Bummer.
> This led us to the compile-the-whole-thing approach, which
> we all find scary.

I don't find that scary.  You'll get used to it as well.  It's only
scary if you can't run the BP programs alongside your non-BP programs,
i.e., if BP is a distinct and completely incompatible architecture and
thus requires a ground-up OS+libs+utils port.  That's not the case
here.  Since we already have a BP glibc, all you gotta do is tackle
one program and library at a time and you can build & test natively on
your non-BP OS.

> Thunks almost work, but it  has the unsolved problem of identifying
> bounded vs non-bounded pointers in a precise manner.

Gaaaack!  Please, let's not waste another sentence on mixing code at
function granularity.  The only useful question is how we are going to
accommodate BP and non-BP libraries (shared and non) on the same
system so as to allow both to run natively.

Greg