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How tested is this in the field? "Safe" for an init replacement is a strong statement. The git repo statistics make this look young but I don't know what Prismriver is.

I'm not saying this to be a jerk, I'm saying this because, well, "safe" is a high bar for an init replacement! And I'm genuinely interested in the answer.



It's just 59 lines of code, 20 of which are merely listing names of signals. I won't say it's safe, but it's certainly easier to audit!


Or it might be possible to generate a proof with a solver[1] of some kind.

[1]: http://www.chargueraud.org/softs/cfml/


"Safe" here means memory and type safety.


What does type safety has anything to do with runtime or user of an init program? Or is not the memory safety provided by the OS already? Does OCaml bring anything specific to the table, or could this've been written in Go as well?


Operating systems usually only provide memory safety between processes. The operating system doesn't protect a C program from overflowing its own buffers or making incorrect writes to the heap for example. OCaml's memory safety means many of those types of bugs aren't possible.


Better type safety is correlated with more correct programs. OCaml has a pretty solid type system which helps with that.


What is the motivation for this question? If written in Go, do you ask why not OCaml? Or think OCaml somehow especially unsuitable?




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