From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <3EF09185.2090900@ameritech.net> From: northern snowfall User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/20020518 Netscape6/6.2.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] The new ridiculous license References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 11:21:25 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: cec23150-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > > >Wouldn't you like to see those pesky 20% lack of speed (in the binary, not >in compilation) disappear? Presumably that's what the BSD people mean by >'improvement'. > If you ask me, it isn't so much about speed that interests the OpenBSD team. The tiny, yet smart, codebase of the Plan 9 compiler project allows the OpenBSD team to go in and hack it to hell much faster than something like GCC. Especially with their wishes of canary values and hacks that attempt to randomize memory values, helping to obfuscate buffer- overflow attacks. GCC has too large a codebase for them to go through and alter what they want without reading how their alterations effect the rest of the design. It seems clear that they're attacking the problem at the wrong end of the spectrum. Not to sound crude, but, if they had the skill to do this in the first place, wouldn't they have designed their own compilers by now? This kind of 'extended-openwall-grsecurity-etc' concept has been thrown around by the OpenBSD team for at least a year, that I know of. Don http://www.7f.no-ip.org/~north_ >