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Comment by louislang | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly not sure the benefits of executing code during compilation/install outweigh the bad. Most attacks we have seen leverage this as the attack vector.

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CTFE (Compile Time Function Execution) is a major feature of D, and has proven to be immensely useful and liked.

Note that CTFE runs as an interpreter, not native. Although there are calls to JIT it, an interpreter makes it pretty difficult to corrupt.

The problem comes when you need to do something bespoke and custom, like building a C dependency so you can link it into your Python (or whatever language) library. Sometimes your options are "run a makefile" or "reimplement an entire library from scratch". I'm not saying that this isn't a problem; it is. I think the better solution is transparent sandboxing for dev environments.

> I think the better solution is transparent sandboxing for dev environments.

I don't disagree at all. We're building an open source sandbox for devs right now for this exact reason. Linked it in another comment.

I'd love transparent sandboxing -- but the difference between me wanting to install the awscli and something that steal awscli's credentials is only a matter of intent, so a bit difficult.

I've basically converted to doing all node development in docker containers with volume mounts for source, now it looks like python is going to need to be there as well, at least for stuff that pulls in any remote dependencies.

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