Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Apple's memory safety work

I was fascinated by this survey article from Apple describing their work on memory safety: Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices.

I spent pretty much my entire 45-year software engineering career working in systems programming areas where memory safety is a constant challenge. We have many many tools (lint, valgrind, Rust, etc) for finding such problems, yet still they seem ever-present.

So it's wonderful to see Apple taking a new approach to the problem, working across multiple layers. Programming languages, operating systems, function libraries, and custom hardware all have a role to play in their work.

This is an approach that is currently possible for Apple, because they deliver integrated systems where such complete stack control is possible. You wouldn't, for example, be able to do this on your Windows PC or on your Linux workstation because in those environments you tend to get the operating system, programming language, and hardware from three different vendors.

So good on Apple for realizing they had an opportunity to do something new and powerful, and for seizing that opportunity and delivering on it.

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