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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

This is what IBM I[1] (AKA AS400) does I think.

Ibm I applications are compiled to a hardware-independent intermediate representation called TIMI, which the SLIC (kernel) can then compile down to machine code, usually at program installation time. As the SLIC is also responsible for maintaining system security, there's no way for a malicious user to sneak in a noncompliant program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i

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I always wondered how secure AS/400 actually is. The original implementation might have checked tag bits in hardware (I don't know), but the current (PowerPC) implementation relies on the compiler generating a "check tag bits" every time a pointer is dereferenced [1]. So it seems that any arbitrary code execution vulnerability would be absolutely devastating. And the "SLIC" is not a small microkernel -- it also contains the compilers, the database and other system components. It'd be hard to believe there would no exploitable bugs in there.

[1] https://www.devever.net/~hl/ppcas

Yes, I agree.

Correct, although I can't be sure I'm remembering the names of the parts correctly. Soltis's book Inside the AS/400 https://archive.org/details/insideas4000000solt is fascinating reading, but the title overpromises rather badly; there is no list of opcodes, for example.

That's basically the same idea as WebAssembly, isn't it?

I don't think WebAssembly has been applied across a whole system just yet. Inferno/Limbo (the successor to Plan9, using the Dis virtual machine) may be substantially closer to the mark, along with AOSP (based on Dalvik/ART) and a variety of JavaScript-based "web" OS's. One may also argue that "image"-based systems like Smalltalk, Oberon etc. are in the same class, and that the lineage ultimately originates from Lisp machines.

Smalltalk predates Lisp machines and didn't originally compile to native code at all. I don't remember if Limbo did. Oberon isn't image-based (you can't save and restore the memory state of the running system) and didn't originally define a machine-independent bytecode format, and the one it had for many years has been removed from the current version. Wasm usually isn't image-based either; though it has a clear pathway for doing so, for example Wasmtime still doesn't implement that functionality: https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/issues/3017

AS400 isn't image based either.

And unlike AS400, I don't think either Smalltalk or Lisp machines used the bytecode abstraction to achieve security.

Agreed.

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