I think there’s an interesting argument to be made about reducing the attack surface area for userspace though. A really naive thing to do would be to run any s

I think there’s an interesting argument to be made about reducing the attack surface area for userspace though. A really naive thing to do would be to run any shell (any program really) in its own isolated environment. The barriers to this aren’t really technical IMO, mostly they are UX barriers. It needs good OS support, and there’s not really a developer oriented OS with smooth mechanisms for escalating and de-escalating privileges at a granular level (sudo ain’t it lol). An ideal development environment would: (1) allow for executing unsigned/self-signed code without jumping through hoops or relying on a 3rd party or App Store, (2) allow for escalation and automatic descalation of fine-grained privileges with native UX for grants (LittleSnitch on macOS has a good design for this specifically for networking IMO —- one could imagine extending this to the file system). There are plenty of systems that have some aspects of these, but I have not seen both, at least not in a form accessible enough to be ubiquitous in 2023.