What is "managed code"?

kirklandkirkland
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
A lot of the coverage of Microsoft's Longhorn OS (a lot of which I find fairly impressive) mentions that the .Net framework used to build Longhorn-native programs includes "managed" code.



What, precisely, does that mean? Is it the sort of thing that Apple's OS X could benefit from?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    stupider...likeafoxstupider...likeafox Posts: 1,618member
    Java is managed code. It's run inside a Virtual Machine that doesn't let you mess with the very guts of the system. This means it's harder to make mistakes that crash your app by corrupting memory, or leave security holes where viruses can overwrite your program with their own code by overflowing buffers.



    C# is mostly a copy of the ideas that Java implements and this is one of them. One key difference is that you can also run "unmanaged code" which means people can port their buggy old C++ and still manage to corrupt and crash the machine with ease and and leave gaping security holes.



    Hmm, that sounds a bit negative. Generally C# is cool, basically everything about it except its relationship to Microsoft is neato.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    kirklandkirkland Posts: 594member
    Ah, I see. Thanks for the comprehensible explanation.
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