[image of the Head of a GNU]

Wanted: A volunteer for making GCC generate code for stack-based VMs

Rhys Weatherley <rweather@zip.com.au> wrote:

I myself experimented with C-based VM's last year.
It is a very hard problem, and is made even harder by
the fact that gcc is not really designed to compile to
stack-based VM's.  This forces the programmer to use
a register-based VM, which usually results in security
going out the window 10 microseconds later.  ICVM
is register-based.

I actually did manage to build a secure sandbox-based
C environment at one point, that had pretty good
performance.  Unfortunately, a complete rewrite of
the gcc RTL system would have been required to
compile code for it: the VM is very particular about
how pointers are handled, and gcc is too sloppy.
I tried writing my own C compiler, but that is a
really easy way to go insane, as I discovered. :-)

I've since been waiting for someone to take on the
hard task of making gcc generate code for stack-based
VM's like CLR.  If that happens, 99% of the rewrite
I need will be done.  So far, no volunteers. :-)

If people are interested, I could post a description
of the instruction set I used and how I tacked some
of the harder problems.

Cheers,

Rhys.