Thanks for such an interesting video, and kudos to the singularity team for their outstanding effort so far (and their awesome ability to explain their work). Looking forward to part III.

One thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is how useful it might be to have a CPU that understands IL. In other words, a specific CLR version is integrated directly into hardware instead of being a software abstraction.

I'm not sure whether this is even feasible but it seems to me that it would have a number of benefits:

  1. Security. The security measures currently enforced by a software layer would instead be enforced at the lowest level - in the CPU itself.
  2. Performance. I'm no expert in hardware but I imagine that performance could be greatly improved (not that it's bad now).

Essentially, unsafe code would be non-existant. This is kind of what you're trying to enforce with singularity but at an even lower level. I can imagine such a CPU being really useful in, for example, mobile phones.

Anyway, just ranting . . . thanks again,
Kent