zerokernel

HTTP-as-an-ABI

That's why high assurance systems (like L4/seL4) minimize privileged code to a tiny fraction of what you find in a regular system, which absolutely makes sense and provably improves security.

Apart from the obvious advantages, minimal privileged code also means that it becomes far more feasible to formally verify the privileged code, like it has been done for seL4, which in turn is an important cornerstone to ensure that isolation (or more generally, specification invariants) does not break in any reachable system state.

Panics can of course result in exploitable system behaviour.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are protecting anyone from any problem.

Honestly I don't quite know how or why engineers keep working in a "all of this is fundamentally broken always has been and never will be fixed" domain, on a motivational basis.

> Byte-by-byte parsing is a valid way to do parsing but not the only way. Byte-by-byte parsers tend to be slow and -- arguably, more importantly -- overly complex and rigid. It is, for example, usually very hard to do "random access" with a byte-by-byte parser, because allowing out-of-order parsing tends to blow the code complexity through the roof.

I have to agree here by experiences past. If the format in question has a chance of being performance sensitive, don't use FSM-based encodings [1]. It is inordinately difficult to optimize parsing these encodings even if you only have to handle tiny subsets, and it still won't be fast. A format like msgpack which prides itself on being very fast may be fast compared to JSON and other ways to express essentially arbitrary structures, but is DEAD SLOW compared to any direct encoding (be it a dedicated encoding you developed in literally a few hours or something like capnproto).

[1] Obviously, considering an encoding more complex than FSM means that you're an idiot and your application will almost certainly have security vulnerabilities related to the format in the future.

> but that's only because no one actually cares about these architectures.

This. Optimizing performance on BE is a waste of everyone's time and resources.

I'll just throw in here that faking contracts and certificates has been a huge business in the last ~1200 years or so in Europe. Many cities who claimed to have been founded a thousand years ago (or whatever) had to cede those claims since the historical papers were faked (usually hundreds of years ago).

option=value, option:value, option/value and even option\value (without dashes). Not joking.

> It would not be easy to do this in a technical manner

-> Homomorphic encryption is an active field of research. Legal is most likely the better solution. Probably.

We'll just outlaw that. Compare: Jaywalking, avenues.

I didn't expect anything interesting to come up as replies, but here we are - thanks for those insights.