Simon Peyton Jones

that has a very good variant of parallel ML going in a similar way.

Essentially, we've moved away from the dream of automatically getting parallel very, very fine-grain to programmer.

We give programmer clues about where it's a good idea to do parallelism, but still the compiler will try not to fork two tiny grains.

Well, yeah, so let's see.

In C, you program my mutations, so it's unsafe in the sense that any function can mutate any variable at any time.

You pass pointers around a lot, and functions mutate the memory pointed to by those pointers, and moreover, typically they can mutate it anywhere.

There's no array bounce checks or anything.

So it's kind of like super unsafe.

And in fact, and this is demonstrated by that.

Can you imagine that all of these exploits that we get every day, right?

That, you know, mythos is discovering in huge numbers, but we've, you know, why is the internet so insecure?

primarily because all of our software infrastructure is written in unsafe languages.

If we'd written all of our internet software and operating systems in Haskell, or maybe in OCaml or ML, 99% of all these exploits would be removed by construction.

Like, it's like we've built a boat out of paperclips and we're surprised that it's leaky.

I mean, you shouldn't build boats out of paperclips, right?

Because they have holes in them.

You should build it out of a secure substance, right?

But then it's too late.

So we spend incredible amounts of human ingenuity and effort patching the holes in our boat built of paperclips.

It's tragic.