And they addressed exactly none of the relevant points, instead supporting their arguments by waving in the general direction of outcompeted designs and speculative designs.

CHERI is neat, but, as far as I am aware, still suffers from serious unsolved problems with respect to temporal safety and reclamation. Last I looked (which was probably after 2022 when this post was made), the proposed solutions were hardware garbage collectors which are almost a non-starter. Could that be solved or performant enough? Maybe. Is a memory allocation strategy that can not free objects a currently viable solution for general computing to the degree you argue people not adopting it are whiners? No.

I see no reason to accept a fallacious argument from authority in lieu of actual arguments. And for that matter, I literally do kernel development on a commercial operating system and have personally authored the entirety of memory management and hardware MMU code for multiple architectures. I am a actual authority on this topic.

> And they addressed exactly none of the relevant points

Clarification: They addressed exactly none of the points you declare as relevant. You identify as an expert in the field and come across as plausibly such, so certainly I’ll still give your opinion on what’s relevant some weight.

Perhaps the author was constrained by a print publication page size limit of, say, one? Or six? That used to be a thing in the past, where people would publish opinions in industry magazines and there was a length cap set by the editor that forced cutting out the usual academic-rigor levels of detail in order to convey a mindset very briefly. What would make a lovely fifty or hundred page paper in today’s uncapped page size world, would have to be stripped of so much detail — of so much proof — in order to fit into any restrictions at all, that it would be impossible to address all possible or even probable argument in a single sitting.