DaveP:
OTOH they might have saved themselves from a lot off troll-slam crap from the fanatics.
To be honest, the trolls don't matter :-) Trolls are a general annoyance especially to those that are their target, but nothing more.
What does matter is the person that buys AmigaOS 4 and expects a well-rounded, stable and finished product. That is what we are trying to achieve.
Trolls, please fire away ;-)
( although lack of application space crash protection is still annoying ).
We are planning to provide a special kernel to developers that has exactly this feature. It is mostly unsuitable for the general user since it will make life very hard for most existing applications, but for those that want to test and try their development on a kernel with isolated address spaces, this will be both a testing aid as well as a means to introduce this feature in the not-too-distant future.
Having said this, OS 4 has the permanent enforcer running because of its memory subsystem (featured in the upcoming CAM edition), and general stability improvements by write-protecting application code and ro-data.
You can also allocate memory as non-public (i.e. just ommit the MEMF_PUBLIC flag) when appropriate; this will later on shield your application data from outside access.
Finally, application stack will be allocated into a special segment that has holes between the different stacks that are access protected, so that a program running out of stack space first gets its own stack enlarged (up to a defined maximum), and runaways that just go into an endless recursion and eventually exhaust their maximum share of stack space wil get hit over the head.
(Hey, did I mention that all of the above also applies to 68k programs? :-) )