Re: Lua OS

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 1:50 AM, steve donovan
<steve.j.donovan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 7:37 AM, Rena <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
>> An interesting idea that comes to mind as well is that since Lua
>> doesn't have the concept of pointers, a script can't just try to write
>> to arbitrary memory or execute arbitrary machine code. What a Lua
>> script can do depends entirely on what functions are available to
>> it.
>
> That's a good one.  The 'leakage' problem is basically why
> module(...,package.seeall) has fallen out of favour (apart from it
> being slower than the alternatives). Good modules should never leak!
>
> I wonder about the minimum amount of C needed, as well. We know LuaJIT
> can bite C heels when carefully crafted, and the FFI gives a
> programmer options for direct access to memory (effectively typed
> native arrays).  And there's no need to write all that tedious binding
> code to access the necessary C.
>
> Some of the bad reactions to the NetBSD Lua-in-kernel move comes from
> C programmers being naive. They automatically think it is the software
> equivalent of structural steel, and anything else is considered at
> best concrete - not useful unless it does have some steel
> reinforcement ;)
>
> steve d.
>

Well, Lua is not terribly useful (for my purposes, at least) without
some C libraries to make various system calls accessible. Even the
standard libraries are written in C. So I guess there's some truth to
that; it's just silly to build everything out of steel instead of
using concrete...

-- 
Sent from my Game Boy.