[grumbelbart]

Can you say what hardware could do better? I.e. which kind of primitives do you miss, or would make it easier to develop safer software?

[pjmlp]

Bounds checking of pointers, C Machine kind of.

Solaris and Linux SPARC since 2015, for example.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/solaris/oracle-...

https://docs.kernel.org/arch/sparc/adi.html

ARM MTE, as another one,

https://learn.arm.com/learning-paths/mobile-graphics-and-gam...

[fweimer]

These approaches can only detect linear overflows deterministically. Use-after-frees (temporal safety violations) are only detected with some probability. It's mostly a debugging tool. And MTE requires special firmware, which is usually not available in the cloud because the tag memory reservation is a boot-time decision.

[checker659]

CHERI, but that's just one example.