On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, Richard Jones wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 07:22:28AM +0100, yoann padioleau wrote:
> > Qemu is written in C, because I guess indeed C struct and union
> > and bitfields makes it easy to match directly to the hardware (no marshalling,
> > there is direct mapping).
> 
> I was hacking on qemu last week, and wishing it wasn't written in C.

I'm genuinely curious as to what part of QEMU being not written in C
would have been a net win..

> 
> There's not much of a technical reason why it couldn't have been
> written in a higher level language.  Bitfield manipulation would be
> more painful unless there was a bitstring-like preprocessor added.
>
> The real reason to use C was to get wider development support.  Qemu
> also happens to be security critical (all those hacked up C device
> emulations offer exploit possibilities for the guests).  And it has
> frequent vulnerabilities.  Go figure ...

I'm sorry, but i don't see how writing device emulation in OCaml would
have made it automatically safer.

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