[jabl]

Hypothetically, sure. One can imagine a system getting rid of virtual memory, and instead using e.g. some kind of capability system to prevent programs from reading memory they're not allowed to. In reality, there's so much software that assumes each process gets its own private address space that I find it very hard to imagine what a transition to this new MMU-less world would look like. Maybe something CHERI-like as an intermediate step?

[noobermin]

Btw, giving rust like safety is even more fine-grained than this, it would have to ensure ownership for pieces of memory within one program, which seems amazingly tedious to do in hardware.

[jabl]

Well, that's what CHERI does, more or less.

[noobermin]

Thanks for the name, after looking it up, it sounds interesting.