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by duneroadrunner 3534 days ago
One of the sanitizer guys tested the mpx instructions on skylake [1]. Tl;dr - Kind of underwhelming. But then, skylake is just the first iteration.

> What was the portability issue?

Oh, it was a long time ago that I investigated it and I don't remember the details very clearly, but for one, I needed a solution that supported Windows. Either it didn't support Windows, or its support for Windows was obsolete or something. I don't really remember. And iirc, it used assembly code and platform specific hacks to try to determine if an object was allocated on the stack or not. Yeah, I don't really remember the details, but it wasn't my intention to develop SaferCPlusPlus. If I could've gotten Ironclad to work for me, I probably would've been happy with that.

> This would be a good selling point to enterprise customers

Yeah, unfortunately I'm not selling anything, otherwise there would be marketing budget :)

[1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerIn...
1 comments
nickpsecurity 3534 days ago
I didn't realize you developed SaferCPlusPlus or that it was an actual thing. I don't follow C++ anymore past what I see in a few forums. I mistakenly thought you were referring to attempts at standardization of safer stuff that they were calling Safer C++ or something in prior articles. So, you actually learned from projects like Ironclad then tried to do it simpler and better in your own project that you coded up. Great attitude and work!

"And iirc, it used assembly code and platform specific hacks to try to determine if an object was allocated on the stack or not."

My plan was to get some academics with an appreciation for making money to dig into it for non-sense like that, test its mechanisms, clean it up, and put in a concurrent, low-latency scheme for dynamic stuff. Then test it against common compilers and FOSS codebases before marketing it to companies to get some safety in various apps. :)

Of course, I have limited influence in current condition and you have no marketing budget for yours. Progress on Great Change stalls once again. Least you're keeping at your own project that might turn into something later.

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