Just testing my memory safe web browser WebKit MiniBrowser compiled with Fil-C on top of Linux userland compiled with Fil-C. GTK4, Weston, etc - all compiled with Fil-C. Posting this both because y'all might find it interesting and because I'm doing QA after having GLM-5.3-flash rebase memory safe glibc from 2.40 to 2.44. |
Seems like the next evolution for memory-safety will be in the hardware, with CHERI.
Language-level memory-safety is all fine and good, if you can afford the rewrite. But, you still have to trust the software supply chain (the compiler, build server, etc).
However, there's a third and broader category called Proof Carrying Code, which could be used to guarantee all kinds of security properties of binaries, including memory-safety in a way that requires no supply chain trust.
With both CHERI And PCC, your machine will simply never perform unsafe memory access, and it doesn't matter what language the binary was authored in.
Seems like language-level and PCC safety guarantees are the kind of thing that AI agents will make much more practical. With AI hacking, this only gets more important. They've already started trying to rewrite everything in Rust, but PCC and CHERI go further.
Redesigning the entire OS stack around zero virtual memory, and purely static allocation, seems like a direction that will need to be done. CHERI makes that much easier.