Hi Mark,

It seems that most of the benefit for fail-faster behavior for VM errors is security. 

To what extent do you think the security problem could be addressed by VMs simply randomizing the point at which stack overflow or OOM happens?  I think this would be more desirable, since it requires no language changes. 

More comments inline...

> On Sep 27, 2015, at 8:46 AM, Mark S. Miller <erights at google.com> wrote:
> 
> [-whatwg, +es-discuss] 
> Reposting to es-discuss, as Anne's more general question is best seen as a JS issue rather than a browser specific one
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Mark S. Miller <erights at google.com> wrote:
>>> On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 7:34 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at annevk.nl> wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Justin Novosad <junov at google.com> wrote:
>>> > Currently there is no spec'ed behavior for handling out-of memory issues
>>> > for the specific case of attempting to allocate a large buffer through
>>> > image data APIs.
>>> 
>>> Actually, there is no specified behavior for out-of-memory behavior,
>>> period. This is a problem that starts with the ECMAScript standard and
>>> everything that builds upon it.
>>> 
>>> I have seen Mark Miller discuss some of the issues surrounding this
>>> and perhaps even the necessity to eventually define it, but so far
>>> this has not happened. Not sure if the full story is documented
>>> somewhere. Mark?
>>> 
>>> https://esdiscuss.org/topic/using-max-stack-limit-to-determine-current-js-engine-and-revision#content-7
>>> indicates there may be security issues with throwing out-of-memory
>>> exceptions.
>> 
>> Well, the full story is never documented ;). However, that post and the links from there:
>> 
>> http://www.eros-os.org/pipermail/e-lang/2007-January/011817.html
>> https://github.com/google/caja/issues/460
>> 
>> are a good start. The security issue is serious and needs to be fixed. It cannot practically be fixed by libraries without additional help by the platform. The problem is that
>> 
>>     * In a language that implicitly allocates everywhere, like JavaScript, Java, and many other oo languages, it is impossible to prevent a code from causing OOM
>>     * If OOM is thrown (see the first link for Java/Joe-E issues), and the language has try/finally, it is impossible to prevent the OOM being masked.
>>     * In such languages, it is impossible to program defensively against the pervasive possibility of OOM -- if execution simply resumes in that context as if nothing bad happened.
>> 
>> In Joe-E we took the painful step of outlawing the Java try/finally from the Joe-E subset of Java for this reason. There was no other reason to outlaw try/finally as there's nothing else inherently unsafe about it. We really tried to find another solution but under our constraints -- no rewriting of the Java nor change to the JVM -- we could not.
>> 
>> By preventing Joe-E code from catching VirtualMachineErrors and from doing a try/finally, the Joe-E code was preemptively terminated immediately on occurrence of a VirtualMachineError. Only the spawner of the Joe-E computation could react to this termination of the computation it spawned. 
>> 
>> This mirrors one of the many thing that Erlang gets right. When a program is confused, that program is the last one you want to ask to recover from the confusion, since it is already impaired by its own confusion. If you don't know what is still true, you are unlikely to engage in repair actions correctly. Better to preemptively terminate some large unit containing the confusion and recover by 
>>     * restarting from earlier known good state, or
>>     * if this is not yet feasible, propagating the termination to a yet larger granularity of computation.
>> 
>> This is the "fail stop" philosophy of "Death Before Confusion". The contrasting philosophy appropriate for some computation is "best efforts". Some JavaScript code is best served by one and some by the other. Security enforcing code must maintain its own integrity at the price of termination (and restart from some coarser grain). Web pages using JavaScript only to spice up the user experience are often best served by best efforts. Erlang itself is an interesting case study, as its original motivating problem -- telephone switches -- places a higher priority on uptime than on integrity. Nevertheless, both Erlang and the Tandem non-stop architecture found that uptime in the large is best served by fail-stop in the small combined with coarser-grain recovery logic.
>> 
>> Because JavaScript comes from such a long legacy of de facto best efforts architecture, I think a direct du jure shift to fail-stop is unlikely. Instead, what we need is a trap-handling mechanism (Erlang "supervisor". KeyKOS "keeper"), where different policies can be expressed by user-defined trap handlers. When multiple policies co-exist, the platform obeys the more severe policies. For concreteness, I'll make here a first sketch:
>> 
>> On OOM, the platform first scans the stack to enumerate all realms represented by in-progress stack frames as of that moment. (In progress meaning that the stack frame still would have been there even if that platform had implemented proper-tail-call.) It gathers the trap handlers associated with each of those realms. Each trap handler is a pair of a string and an optional function.
>> 
>> The string indicates the choice of trap handling strategy, where these strategies are ordered by severity. Among the gathered strategies, the most severe win and the rest are discarded. From least to most severe, they are
>> 
>> "THROW"
>> "ABORT_JOB"
>> "REFRESH"
>> "ABORT_EVENT_LOOP"

This seems pretty sensible, but I'd like it more if it was simpler. 

Wouldn't this be practically as useful if we just had THROW and ABORT_EVENT_LOOP?  I can see how to use those modes, but I don't know how to use the others. 

>> 
>> Except for "THROW", all the rest cause the current turn/job to first be preemptively terminated without running catch or finally blocks. If during any one trap handling strategy we run out of reserve memory, then we automatically escalate to the next more severe strategy. Alternatively, if a trap handling function is itself associated with yet another otherwise-uninvolved realm with its own trap handler, then an OOM inside this trap handler might be handled by that handler's handler.
>> 
>> This is just a first sketch. It is probably too complicated in some ways and insufficiently general in others. I post it mostly to get the discussion started.
>  
> 
> -- 
>     Cheers,
>     --MarkM
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It seems that most of the benefit for fail-faster behavior for VM errors is security. 

To what extent do you think the security problem could be addressed by VMs simply randomizing the point at which stack overflow or OOM happens?  I think this would be more desirable, since it requires no language changes. 

More comments inline...

> On Sep 27, 2015, at 8:46 AM, Mark S. Miller <erights at google.com> wrote:

>> The string indicates the choice of trap handling strategy, where these strategies are ordered by severity. Among the gathered strategies, the most severe win and the rest are discarded. From least to most severe, they are
>> 
>> "THROW"
>> "ABORT_JOB"
>> "REFRESH"
>> "ABORT_EVENT_LOOP"

This seems pretty sensible, but I'd like it more if it was simpler. 

Wouldn't this be practically as useful if we just had THROW and ABORT_EVENT_LOOP?  I can see how to use those modes, but I don't know how to use the others.