[fuwafuwa]

There's implications for development whenever we have a sandbox wall, too. There are serious differences in the development experience of a binary language with no runtime model, a binary language with one, a language wrapped in a high level, fully sandboxed VM, and a language compiled to another language. Some of them allow productivity, others restrict entire application categories.

Once you have a runtime, dynamic linking suffers. Once you have a VM, you lose vast swathes of control over I/O and resources. And once you target a different language you end up with lowest-common-denominator semantics and debugging capabilities.

In some respects, the JVM-style sandboxed language runtime is an "original mistake" because it's an OS-like environment that doesn't have access to OS-like features, leading to a lot of friction at the edges and internal bloating as more and more features are requested. If we had similar access to memory, devices etc. everywhere the friction wouldn't be experienced as such, even if there were protections enforced that hurt performance in certain cases. You'd design to a protocol, and either the device and OS would support it or it wouldn't. That's how the Internet itself managed to scale.

But as it is, the stuff we have to work with in practical systems continues to assert that certain line of coder machismo: unsafe stuff will always be unsafe and You Should Know What You Are Doing, and anyone who wants safety is a Newbie Who Should Trust A Runtime.

[pjmlp]

Apparently C developers still don't know what they are doing, after 50 years.

"12. Trust the programmer, as a goal, is outdated in respect to the security and safety programming communities. While it should not be totally disregarded as a facet of the spirit of C, the C11 version of the C Standard should take into account that programmers need the ability to check their work."

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2021.htm