[Vm-dev] Re: SegmentationFault in with OmniBrowser

[Philippe Marschall]

2007/5/22, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de>:
>
> Philippe Marschall wrote:
> >> Lovely idea. But....
> >> Building bytecodes is just like using assembler; you can corrupt
> >> anything. Normally the compiler generates the correct, safe, code but
> >> if you're using some other tool that can be persuaded to pop the
> >> stack and save to x'th instance var ofan object that has only x-1,
> >> then you're in trouble because you've almost certainly stomped on the
> >> header of the next object in memory. Sure, we could make the basic
> >> routines check the bounds every time. Care to imagine the performance
> >> impact?
> >
> > Java doesn't run exactly slow.
>
> Java isn't doing any runtime checks either. So what is your point?

Java has a bytecode verifyer to prevent these problems with zero
runtime cost (if you don't count class loading). Squeak could have the
same.

Cheers
Philippe

> Cheers,
>    - Andreas
>