Re: Virtual Machine in the abstract (was Re: [DotGNU]What languages shouldDotGNU support?)

[Peter Minten]

Fergus Henderson wrote:

> The drawback of this approach (compared to using just the one intermediate
> language, CIL) is that it is less secure, because it relies on a larger
> trusted code base.  Instead of needing to trust just one interpreter,
> you need to trust all the different languages interpreters.  Bugs in
> the Ruby interpreter, for example, could result in security holes.

Why? The webservice programmer can decide what language he/she wants to use. If
the programmer doesn't believe a language is secure enough he/she can pick
another language. And the user who downloads a webservice can chose to execute
or not.

Support for more languages might even be beneficial to security since a bug in
one language interpreter doesn't affect as much webservices as when only one
language is used.

Greetings,

Peter