 Idel: a virtual machine for mobile code
started 10/31/2002; 9:04:44 AM - last post 10/31/2002; 9:21:48 AM
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Luke Gorrie - Idel: a virtual machine for mobile code 
10/31/2002; 9:04:44 AM (reads: 1749, responses: 1)
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| Idel: a virtual machine for mobile code |
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Idel is a free virtual machine for safely and portably running untrusted code. This is not a new programming language, but a substrate for existing ones. It's designed to:
- be relatively language neutral, able to sandbox unsafe languages like C
- control resource consumption
- support mobility and persistence (including runtime stack state)
- need only an auditably small trusted computing base
- yield small object files and fast execution
- accommodate capability security mechanisms in a coming release
- be easy to incorporate in other programs, the way Tcl is.
A very cool program by our own Darius Bacon, who is also the reigning champion of our Idel-based Roshambo contest.
Posted to implementation by Luke Gorrie on 10/31/02; 9:08:34 AM
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Luke Gorrie - Re: Idel: a virtual machine for mobile code
10/31/2002; 9:21:48 AM (reads: 575, responses: 0)
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I think the most fun feature of Idel is the "freeze" instruction. It's like the Unix fork(), except that the parent continues to run while the child is written as a file on disk. The file can be copied anywhere and then restarted by feeding it to an Idel VM.
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