Beyond the PDP-11
David Chisnall, Colin Rothwell, Robert N. M. Watson, Jonathan D. Woodruff, Munraj Vadera, Simon W. Moore, Michael Roe, Brooks Davis, Peter G. Neumann · 2015
We propose a new memory-safe interpretation of the C abstract machine that provides stronger protection to benefit security and debugging. Despite ambiguities in the specification intended to provide implementation flexibility, contemporary implementations of C have converged on a memory model similar to the PDP-11, the original target for C. This model lacks support for memory safety despite well-documented impacts on security and reliability.