Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Interesting comment in that thread:

"It's worth mentioning the function representation change, since it means closures no longer require runtime code generation (which among other things allows the heap to be marked non-executable on supported systems)."

Anyone know what that means?



Marking the heap's region of memory as non-executable improves security. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_space_protection


Sorry, I wasn't clearer, but I have heard of NX. The part I was wondering about was how the function representation changed.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit

Edit: dylanvee was faster, the NX-bit is the underlying hardware feature


The gory details are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bMwCey-gmqZVTpRax-ESeVuZ...

TL;DR: functions are now represented as (function pointer, pointer to a context structure), whereas before they were represented as a single function pointer.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: