[wangchow]

This whole movement seems strange to me. It's like these are statically linking the entire OS to run a single app. Why not ditch the OS completely? I'd say this is taking the whole container concept a bit far, but who knows what will come next!

[zenlikethat]

If I'm not mistaken, the whole idea _is_ to ditch the OS completely. To avoid a fully functioning kernel with lots of juicy device drivers to exploit, code intended to work on systems your app will never need to worry about running on, and layers upon layers of abstraction ready and waiting to be exploited (e.g. shells).

One reason MirageOS uses OCaml, for instance, is for its memory safety properties. A truly staggering amount of vulnerabilities (e.g. Heartbleed) are due to abusing unintended ways of accessing memory in programs which face the public Internet. Since we've proven over and over again at this point that we can't reliably write safe C code, there's a reason folks are interested in eliminating as much of it as possible, all the way down to the hypervisor level. Since so many devices will be Internet-connected soon, having a way to write apps without even a possibility of "Oops" bugs like this is even more critical.

[wangchow]

Interesting. I'll have to do a bit more research on this.