5 ms·

Don't let the work of a few OpenBSD developers discourage you from creating your own file(1) implementation using your new favourite "secure" language of the we

• viraptor 11y ago
  Everyone can write their own. Not everyone can substitute the implementation used by a large distribution and make a proper announcement people will care about. I don't understand why are you mocking language choice point though. Pretty much any language which doesn't manage memory directly would be a good choice. This utility doesn't even have big performance requirements. Basically I'm saying that we can try very very hard to write secure code in languages which invite issues, or... try to eliminate whole classes or issues at a time. Is it such a terrible idea?
  • brynet 11y ago
    New languages and technologies come and go and you're free to use them. OpenBSD will continue to create new software while adhering to modern C coding practices, even when that means defining them.
    • viraptor 11y ago
      > New languages and technologies You mean decades-old languages like Perl and Python for example? Technologies like the ones we can finally now afford to implement - actual syscall filtering and selective capabilities dropping? Supporting utilities which only matter at development time? How do those go away? And I wrote in the first message - OpenBSD integrates `file`, has to use C and doesn't implement seccomp. They couldn't become the poster child. But the next `file` reimplementation probably won't hit the news anymore. People can improve the way we write software right now. But choose a project at random and they don't care or don't use what's available for free. Some promotion would be great when everyone's looking.
  • bandrami 11y ago
    You have a lot more faith in the authors of memory management algorithms than I do.