Nice to find these discussions in the wild :)

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=13749&offset=10&rows=15&threshold=-1#98071

Only the 6mb exe urban myth stays floating around :/

Daniël

Well, without striping ...

Another point is that people think managed enviroments are better which wrong imo. I don't see the point of a managed environment when a secure operanting system is used.

EXACTLY !!

I've been saying this for years. There is no need for a managed environment if the host OS does it's job correct...

But both Sun and Microsoft propagate another story :/

Michael.

In fact, the host OS provides a managed environment :)

Florian Klaempfl wrote

> I've been saying this for years. There is no need for a managed > environment if the host OS does it's job correct... In fact, the host OS provides a managed environment :)

I don't think there are many host OS'es out there which e.g. only run signed applications. The fact is that for some purposes, none of the current OS'es "does its job correctly" in that sense. Just use the right tool for the job, I personally don't understand all this hostility against managed environments (except as a reaction against claims that they are always much better than unmanaged environments, but overdoing it in the other direction isn't going to get the discussion anywhere).

Jonas

Well, the very idea of a program running in a managed environment which by itself is also a managed environment seems like a waste of resources. Secondly, too many links in the chain makes it easier for the chain to break...

The advantage of running 'signed' applications also eludes me. Even so, provided you really want that, you could easily integrate that in the OS, without having a new managed environment...

Michael.

The environments have different management capabilities. The OS manages the hardware and provides an interface between the hardware and the software. These managed environments pure manage software. They don't have a compatibility scourge to deal with, and therefore can break paradigms which are widely in use but which are inherently insecure (such as pointers) or which make programs unverifiable (self- modifying code, data-in-code and code-in data, code flow which is impossible to determine etc).

Secondly, too many links in the chain makes it easier for the chain to break...

I don't think a managed environment is easier to break than in case you try to stuff all those things in an already existing environments.

Then you have to integrate it in every OS, bolting it on on structures which were never designed for such things. It can be much safer and sometimes even easier to start from scratch and build something from the ground up which was made for this purpose. A bit like the difference between adapting Turbo Pascal into a 32/64 bit retargettable compiler (I wonder whether Borland wouldn't have advanced faster if they started Delphi from scratch rather than reusing stuff from TP in the beginning) and starting Free Pascal (should that have been a possible choice back in the days).

Jonas

This is all true, but none of these cannot be handled by the OS. No-one said that an OS has to apply the same rules to user-space programs and to device drivers. In fact, most don't...

It's not about breaking in.
But 2 cooperating programs break down easier than 1.

Now you must rewrite your engine on each OS. To do that, you must build some kind of OS-asbtraction layer if you don't want to re-implement from scratch, so, it's the same thing as far as I can see...

Anyway, it's not really worth the discussion. It exists, people use it...

Michael.