Ironwall Design Thesis

Ironwall Design Thesis

Core premises:

• Practical engineering languages cannot provide engineering-meaning-guarantees for memory/concurrency safety through type systems and static checking.

• Expecting type systems and static analysis to guarantee memory/concurrency safety is the computer-science version of "perpetual motion machine" delusion.

Core position:

• Safety first, especially preventing RCE.
• The core path is reducing complexity.
• Eliminate massive security costs caused by saving a few keystrokes.
• Reject the delusion that type systems and static analysis have superpowers.
• Reject the delusional overestimation of what engineer discipline can achieve.
• Use high-cost-effectiveness abstraction mechanisms.
• Tool analyzability must be a first-class design goal.
• Embrace runtime mechanisms.
• Compile to native.
• Fail fast:Recoverable failures should be modeled with explicit data models. On unrecoverable failures, terminate immediately.