Re: Heartbleed

[Simon Clubley <clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP>]

On 2014-04-17, Alan Jump <alan.jump@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, April 17, 2014 2:51:34 PM UTC-7, Shark8 wrote:
>> Is there a reason that C as the 'core' component would be any better 
>> 
>> than, say, FORTH?
>

Are there FORTH compilers for every platform a C compiler runs on ?

If you want to implement a mainstream library such as OpenSSL in a new
safer language (such as Oberon-14), then your new library needs to be
compilable on every platform the C version of OpenSSL is currently
compilable on.

That means your compiler (ie: Oberon-14) for this new library needs to
be written in a language which allows it to run on the same platform as
the platform's existing C compiler [*].

If it isn't then it won't get used (or at least in any meaningful way)
because people will just use the version of the OpenSSL library which
_does_ build on all the platforms they want to develop their application
code on.

The only compiler implementation language I can think of which matches
the above criteria is C.

I really don't know how many times I am going to have to repeat this. :-)

If you think I am wrong, then, while telling me I am wrong :-), please
also tell me why Ada isn't in much more wider use than it currently is.

> Not in my mind, since CPUs don't care about the human-readable language...all
> they care about is the bytecode the compiler generates.
>

I hope the above helps explain what the real core issue is here.

[*] (This isn't sufficient, but it's a required pre-requisite. You also
have the additional issue of supported target platforms as well in a
cross compiler setup but that's not a function of the chosen compiler
implementation language.)

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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