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Comment by NohatCoder | Hacker News Reader

Nothing wrong with Rust, but I still think making operating systems with airtight sandboxing and proper permission enforcement is the only thing that can truly solve these issues.

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Only if the barriers have a finer resolution than a single application. Most applications need access to more than enough data to cause problems in the case of an exploit. You need sandboxing between different components of the application as well.

Still not enough, because apps still need to interact with the outside world, so there would have to be intentional holes in the sandbox out through which the compromised app could act maliciously.

That is why you need a well designed permission system. Android and iOs had a chance of doing this in a time when the requirements could reasonably be understood, but I don't think either came close.

And what language should we use to create such an OS? Maybe Rust?

It is a better choice than C++ for sure.

May I humbly suggest Holy C?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUrbyfzm6i0

https://templeos.holyc.xyz/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html

Look at how often V8’s sandboxes get exploited. It’s all developed by humans, which means there will always be errors.

Saying just make airtight sandboxes is like just write bug-free code.

It is a tradeoff. Making an airtight sandbox is not that hard. Making it run programs near hardware speed is a lot harder. Making it run legacy machine code is a nightmare.

JavaScript is not machine code, but still a good deal harder to make fast than a language designed for fast sandboxing. Of course there have been bugs, but mostly I think the JS VMs have done a pretty good job of protecting browsers.

I feel like those are two separate levels of concerns though.

Airtight sandboxing would be easier in a memory safe language prevents certain classes of bugs.

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