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Whatever Happened to Sandboxfs?

Back in 2017–2020, while I was on the Blaze team at Google, I took on a 20% project that turned into a bit of an obsession: sandboxfs. Born out of my work supporting iOS development, it was my attempt to solve a persistent pain point that frustrated both internal teams and external users alike: Bazel’s

Born out of my work supporting iOS development, it was my attempt to solve a persistent pain point that frustrated both internal teams and external users alike: Bazel’s poor sandboxing performance on macOS. I ran many microbenchmarks to exercise symlink creations and deletions in large amounts and could never observe a significant performance degradation compared to Linux. This was an enlightening exercise because, as I tried to convert the code “verbatim”, I discovered many subtle concurrency bugs and data races that Rust just didn’t let me write.

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