alt Hacker NewsMicroVM this, effects that --- can we discuss security without needing to invoke bay area buzzwords?
The idea is "least privilege", and we desperately need it in computing. The precise technical mechanism we use to achieve it is less important than committing to the idea that a dependency doesn't run with full privilege of its host program and an install script doesn't run with full privilege of the programmer.
The original Linux seccomp is old enough to drink. It's always been possible to do things like expand macros in a no-IO environment. Nobody's bothered to do it over the past two decades. Why would anyone bother in the next two decades?
The technical mechanism is exactly the issue to figure out, there's a reason why projects don't have this and it's because different implementations have different tradeoffs.