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by FpUser 618 days ago
>"Like an application platform (forget documents) built entirely on wasm, and with capability based security. That would let you launch apps made within the platform just as easily as you currently open a website."

In the end you will end up with the platform / OS which will lose to competitors because of performance and lack of features and do not expect it to be secure. Developers will manage to leave some holes and hackers will find their way.
1 comments
josephg 618 days ago
Disagree. The web wouldn't be anywhere near as successful if you needed to trust & "install" websites before you could visit them. How does that work? Why don't you need to install / trust a website to use it? Well, because it has this kind of security model. Websites are sandboxed.

The web's sandboxed security model makes it better for users. And that in turn drives popularity.

I think the same could be true for a good application platform. The trick is using the sandboxing + capability based security model to enable "new" usability features that traditional applications can never deliver.

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bee_rider 618 days ago
Sandboxing has to be the funniest bit of wordplay anyone has ever made in tech. Sand is, of course, notoriously impossible to contain and never stays in the box. And it is not nearly as clever as an attacker!
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PaulDavisThe1st 618 days ago
The term doesn't come from the idea of containing sand.

It comes from things built for children to play in that have an edge with contents inside it. You play "in a sandbox" without having to deal with anything outside of the sandbox.

The sand in a children's sandbox spills over and gets everywhere. The children playing inside it .. they don't have to care. They are playing inside the sandbox, and for now, the world outside it is not relevant.

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kibibu 618 days ago
> You play "in a sandbox" without having to deal with anything outside of the sandbox

I mean, besides "gifts" from the neighbourhood cats. How do they fit into the metaphor?

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josephg 618 days ago
Hah true!

My girlfriend has strong opinions about how we use the word "library" to describe a software package.

Surely the metaphor should be that one package is a "book" and the entire package repository is the library, right? Left pad is an entire library? Huh?

And then we have no collective noun for collections of libraries!

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bee_rider 618 days ago
So then a function or subroutine or whatever could be a chapter? I’d be down for that I think.
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