Unmanaged Code Considered Harmful

Yes, I am spoofing the title of the famous Considered Harmful article. Add me to the pile....

Not to mention totally dating you as a dinosaur, it is just not where things are headed.

I just want to break in here and say Wikipedia is just awesome for providing citings.

Managed code is the new virus that will take over the programming organism, and we will all be in the trusting hands of the JITter. Don't try to slip one past the goalie, or you will be suspended from the CPU party.

Soon there will be so much surplus compute power, even device drivers will be written in managed code, what with hypervisors and all doing the heavy lifting, and operating system is just another user-level application; how ironically wonderful.

The pigeons have come home to roost, Bobby Boucher....

With all this emphasis on the managed universe, and the reductio ad absurdum of operating systems into "normal" applications, what is the real need for all of those unsafe unmanaged instructions?

Can we dream even bigger? Can the managed code virus spread "over the wire" to the embedded platform? And we're not talking about Smart Phones or Pocket PCs, but DVD players, toasters or whatever. Can it infect the last bastion of progamming immunity? I mean, .NET Micro Framework, how far away can it be?

If we have our way, i.e. transistor densitiy will continue to increase, then it is inevitable that enough transistors will be assembled cheaply enough to give one an entire server on a wafer; plenty of power to run a normal programming environment, the managed code environment.

I just want to break in here and say Wikipedia hit 100% on citings for this post.