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What exactly is "an exceptionally restrictive sandbox"?

There are virtual machines such as JVM, V8, or even QEMU. These are sandboxes, which run either some special bytecode or native code with extreme performance drawbacks. Media decoders are performance- and energy-sensitive pieces of software in the end.

And media decoders actually ARE sandboxes of sorts. They are designed to interpret media formats, sometimes even Turing-complete bytecode in retrictive and isolated environments. And like any sandboxes, they too have bugs.



> JVM, V8, or even QEMU

> extreme performance drawbacks

That's just not true.

> And media decoders actually ARE sandboxes of sorts. They are designed to interpret media formats, sometimes even Turing-complete bytecode in retrictive and isolated environments. And like any sandboxes, they too have bugs.

It's pretty easy to sandbox a simple bytecode, but that's not the bulk of what a media decoder is doing. A plain old decoder is mostly not sandboxing what it does.




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