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A comment on Doas – Dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor. Parent comment

Re:Doas – Dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor by ghshephard on Monday July 20, 2015 @06:33AM (#9915073)
Re: Multiplatform Sudo - you bring up a really good point, which is that sudo, a multi-platform utility; It really didn't belong in base. I wonder how many other targets there are that will yield to the wonderful minimalist that is Ted Unangst (who also wrote the signify tools).

I'd be interesting in knowing what their thinking is as well. If I had to totally guess - it would be that the OpenBSD team has 15+ years of world-class expertise in writing safe/secure C code, and that switching to a different language would (A) mean having to learn how to do this all over in another language (albeit in a much, much easier manner) and (B) dealing with the abstractions that a language might bring, that didn't exist when you were writing in C.

Presumably the advantages of having a memory safe language don't have the benefits for the OpenBSD team that outweigh the negatives. Yet. I guess time will tell.

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Re:Doas – Dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor by MeNotMe on Monday July 20, 2015 @07:58AM (#9915385)
This opens you up for disruption, if others with less expertise can write the same secure code using e.g. Rust (I have no clue about Rust)
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Re:Doas – Dedicated OpenBSD application subexecutor by vog on Monday July 20, 2015 @08:36AM (#9915565)
At the moment, the best candidate for such a disruption may be MirageOS, written entirely in OCaml.

On the other hand, MirageOS has no hardware drivers and depends entirely on a Xen hypervisor. This may be a smart move to get it all going, but also means a fundamental dependency on yet another large piece of unsafe code.

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