alt Hacker NewsThe cost is that developing that simple script to execute something and accessing files will have to be constructed differently. It will be much more complex.
That or the OS settings for said script will need to be handled. That is time and money.
The cost is that developing that simple script to execute something and accessing files will have to be constructed differently. It will be much more complex.
That or the OS settings for said script will need to be handled. That is time and money.
I've said this elsewhere in this thread - but I think it might be interesting to consider how capabilities could be used to write simple scripts without sacrificing simplicity.
For example, right now when you invoke a script - say "cat foo.js" - the arguments are passed as strings, parsed by the script and then the named files are opened via the filesystem. But this implicitly allows cat to open any file on your computer.
Instead, you could achieve something similar with capabilities. So, I assume the shell has full access to the filesystem. When you call "cat foo.js", the shell could open the file and pass the file handle itself to the "cat" program. This way, cat doesn't need to be given access to the filesystem. In fact, literally the only things it can do are read the contents of the file it was passed, and presumably output to stdout.
> It will be much more complex.
Is this more complex? In a sense, its exactly the same as what we're doing now. Just with a new kind of argument for resources. I'm sure some tasks would get more complex. But also, some tasks might get easier too. I think capability based computing is an interesting idea and I hope it gets explored more.