Comment by pjmlp
8 hours ago
Unfortunately, capabilities based OSes, or written in mostly safe systems programming languages aren't by lack of trying.
However outside mainframes and micro-computers, or niche deployments, adoption has been a challenge.
iOS/macos and linux both support capabilities, now the depth of those capabilities in all cases might lack depth but people are moving in this way.
Let's take filesystem access on linux for example. You can run as a user without permission, or you can configure something like apparmor/SELinux to stop the program if it attempts do do something not on the list, or you can use containerization to build a limited world for the program to see...
But isn't this all a bit adhoc? The fundamental presumption is of unrestricted capability and then the OS provides options for restriction.
Perhaps I've misunderstood it but I think capabilities are inside out from all of that: You need to walk, so here are some legs. You need to swim so here are some fins. As-is it's more like: you can't go over there so here's an ankle monitor.
As does Windows, that doesn't mean they are actually used as they should.