I suspect that the solution to unsafe languages like C/C++ will end being a small sanitizer runtime like CFI(<a href="https://dslab.epfl.ch/research/cpi/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://dslab.epfl.ch/research/cpi/</a>), that also supports some form of extended MTE, for memory safety.<p>For hot parts of the code that the sanitizer can guarantee is safe, either due to it being trivial or with annotations(<a href="https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p2771r0.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...</a>), it can safely exclude these checks to limit performance impact.<p>This seems much more realistic than e.g. Microsoft rewriting Excel in Rust with bug for bug compatibility. It would also benefit Rust code, that has sections marked as unsafe.
Despite the value this offers I'm not keen to be a guinea pig, especially as the Pixel 8 Pro already has some unpredictable lagginess with software already, so I don't want to add to the mix with additional things that could confuse diagnosis.<p>The most annoying is the PDF viewer gets stuck but it happens with other things intermittently. It's frustrating as these things worked fine on the Pixel 6 Pro under Android 14, so they seem like reversions or maybe something different on a system level/perhaps even hardware related (but I've not looked into it to be able to tell).
Related submission from earlier today: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38125379">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38125379</a><p>(Though this article also explains how to enable MTE for user apps and verify that it's enabled.)
Ugh, I thought it would be a switch in settings. It is a lot of work at this point to enable it.<p>What was fascinating to me was that they are already picking up bugs in existing apps, which is a plus in that even having a small number of people running this will provide security for the rest of us that aren't running it by finding buggy and malicious apps.