Re: Embedded Io Examination (Speed and Security)

Hi Joshua,

> - The benchmarks appear to have disappeared; is Io still considered
> faster than Python and closer to the speed of Lua?  Lua's speed
> appears to be 'close enough' for most which means less would have to
> be spun off to C++.  I'm already well familiar with the concept of
> running profiles and spinning too-slow segments off to C but as I
> categorically hate C++, the less I have to put there the better.

Io was never faster than Python for what is tested in typical benchmarks. It beat it for message sending performance, but Io sends many more messages (as everything is a message in Io) so this doesn't imply typical code will run faster. Io should excel in concurrency and vector math performance relative to Python/Ruby.

> - Embedding docs have become more sparse; is it still relatively
> simple (albiet tedious) to embed?  I have written a tool using Ragel
> to scan over headers and make a tags file for methods/objects to be
> exported, so I have quite a bit of tolerance for the needed
> boilerplates.

It's simple if you mean having a standard way of embedding docs such that you can extract them to html.

> - Sandbox safety.  I recall discussions here that in the past
> (versions I used to use supported this) rendering Io safe to use by
> potentially untrusted code was a matter of nilling out slots from the
> Lobby before using the VM.  I also recall that this was changed at
> some point, so I'm left having to ask: Realistically how would one put
> a CPU/RAM throttle and remove access to dangerous methods?  I've seen
> a sandbox header for the Io VM but it lacks many of the methods for a
> normal one.

Jer did some work on this - you might want to check out the Sandbox proto.

Cheers,
Steve