[DotGNU]IVM Project

[Carsten Kuckuk]

Daniel,

I printed out the spec last night and read it on the commuter train back
home. The IVM team essentially created a specification for a Motorola 68000
like 32 bit processor, assigned 16 bit opcodes to instructions and
implemented an interpreter for it as well as an adoption of the gcc
compiler.

Advantages:
+ Portable
+ It works
+ Very fast

Disadvantages:
- No separation of data and code
- Interface to the underlying operating system is POSIX
- No built-in security, not even a sandbox

My assessment:
o Good piece of Engineering: It's there, it works, it solves a problem, it's
GPLed, it's tested.
o In order to be used as one of the VMs for DotGnu, security needs to be
added. As one of the rules in secure programming is that you can never add
security to a system, but that it needs to be designed into it, I don't know
if that is possible.
o For my personal taste it's too close to real untyped assembly language.

Carsten Kuckuk