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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I get that this is a bug, but it kinda sucks that people feel it’s all right to act this way. Software is hard and unless you’re using a language with zero-overhead iteration you’re probably writing your drivers in C and iterating with a for-loop like our ancestors did. Off by one errors are stupidly common and everyone is human.

    I mean, fuck mega corporations. This is still cringeworthy.

    That being said, it’s going to be fun to see quality differences in these operating systems in a few years because, as far as I know, Apple would rather force Swift into the systems-level language space than adopt a memory-safe language today.

    Meanwhile Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, etc are all investing heavily in Rust by integrating it into their platforms.




  • There’s languages designed with Capabilities in mind. Like, whatever starts the program gets to decide what functionality is exposed to the running program. It’s great for situations where you might run untrusted code and want to, as an example, not allow network access, or filesystem access.

    More generally there’s also sandboxing techniques that runtimes provide. Webassembly for instance is designed for programs to run in their own memory space with a restricted set of functions and, again, Capabilities. This might be nice if you ever work on a cloud application that allows users to upload their own programs and you want to impose limits on those programs. Think AWS Lambda, except the programs running wouldn’t necessarily even have access to the filesystem or be able to make web requests unless the user configures that.

    It might be a good design space for even more esoteric areas, like device drivers. Like, why worry if your GPU drivers are also collecting telemetry on your computer if you can just turn off that capability?

    There’s older applications of sandboxing that are a bit further from what you’re asking as well; like, iframes on a webpage; allowing code served from different servers you don’t necessarily control to run without needing to worry about them reading access tokens from local storage.

    Or even BSD Jails and chroot.

    Good question 💖