> A Docker image is a piece of executable code that produces some output given some input.
The ideas behind containerization and sandboxing are rather closely related to functional programming and controlling side effects. If binaries always only read stdin and wrote to stdout, we wouldn't need sandboxes – they would be pure functions.
In the real world, though, binaries usually have side effects and I really wish we could control those in a more fine-grained manner. Ideally, binaries couldn't just do anything by default but actually had to declare all their side effects (i.e. accessing env variables, config, state, cache, logs, DBUS/Xserver/Wayland sockets, user data, shared libraries, system state, …), so that I could easily put them in a sandbox that's tailored to them.
Conversely, I'm waiting for the day when algebraic effects are so common in programming languages that I can safely execute an untrusted JavaScript function because I have tight control over what side effects it can trigger.
Surely your proposed solution is not "Don't implement a permission system to begin with"?
Is there a spark of practical potential? It's intriguing to imagine, how a Docker-like container could be a language primitive, as easy to spin up like a new thread or worker. Not sure what advantage that'd bring, or any possible use case. It reminds me of..
2.1 Xappings, Xets, and Xectors
All parallelism in Connection Machine Lisp is organized around a data structure known as the zapping (pronounced “zapping,” and derived from “mapping”). Xappings are data objects similar in structure to arrays or hash tables, but they have one essential characteristic: operations on the entries of xappings may be performed in parallel.
https://github.com/a11ce/docker-lisp/actions/runs/2216831271...
500+ container invocations to compute factorial(3)
Also why are the image builds hard-coded for amd64? Are you really doing anything here that can't be done on arm?
I was getting warnings without that line and don't know how else to fix it (this is my first time using Docker). A PR would be welcome if there's a better way.
/s
I guess what I am saying is at the end of the day you need the program to do the thing. Whatever mutation it needs to do to accomplish the task, that's what you're going to allow. That's exactly what happens with phone app permissions. Everybody just lets Facebook use their microphone (not me of course, but most people).
What you describe would be super cool though. If every program let you know ahead of time what it was going to try to read and write in the world. That does indeed sound useful!