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Comment by madflame991 | Hacker News Reader

> having a trusted compiler could (eventually) massively increase performance by removing processes entirely (no more virtual memory! no more TLB flushes and misses! less task switch overhead!) and eliminating the kernel/user mode separation

I saw a talk a while ago that was advocating for the same thing, except this was about JS and not webassembly. I can't find it tho - I remember it being related to the WAT js talk; It also mentioned that it would eliminate rings on the cpu (and simplify cpus) and context switches which would make execution faster; they were citing some MS research on the matter - damn I really wanna find the talk now...

Edit: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

thanks BoppreH

MS research: "Hardware-based isolation incurs nontrivial performance costs (up to 25-33%) and complicates system implementations" (virtual memory and protection rings); I think MS knows what they're talking about here

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Singularity was a experimental OS written in a a variant of C# and .Net managed code by MS Research that ran using software isolated processes rather than hardware isolation, this is probably what they where referencing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

There is also a really great blog about Singularity’s “rebirth” experimental OS, Midori, that continued in its footsteps.

Thanks for the link. I would argue that a true trusted compiler needs to accept an unmanaged language and emit code without a runtime, though. A runtime is cheating, because you can always make one that implements an iron-clad sandbox that doesn't require processes...by implementing a (very slow) VM.

To put in another way - I don't think that security or performance are that hard to achieve on their own - the hard part is getting both at once. And then, adding expressiveness on top is even more difficult, as Rust as aptly demonstrated.

Rust is not secure at all in the sense used here — untrusted, arbitrary user code written in rust is a security threat.

More specifically, unsafe blocks may violate the compiler's security guarantees and procedural macros actually run inside the compiler process at build time. Declarative macros do this too, but they're far too restricted to allow shenanigans. Procmacros can disable Rust's stability guarantees[0].

[0] https://github.com/m-ou-se/nightly-crimes

Nah, that’s not what I mean. It is a Turing complete language — if it is used to interpret some other language inside itself, it can’t add anything to that languages’ guarantees automatically. You can write a javascript interpreter in rust that is trivial to exploit and access e.g. the file system or whatever.

I think I heard of this in the early to mid 00’s and it was in the context of Java. This set of ideas has been cooking for a while. Might be about time to taste the proverbial soup.

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