Any standard pixmap library that is sufficiently fast *without* using
"unsafe" language is a win. Pixmap libraries are one of the most
prolific class of unacceptably buggy code implemented C, and routinely
provide remote exploit vectors via Web browsers and copied document
files, as well as finely targeted attacks via email.
I was hoping something like Rust would solve this problem for GNU/Linux,
of sufficiently good C programming being too difficult in practice. But
the Rust language and toolchain now have size, complexity, and security
issues of their own to address.
Not that I expect GNU/Linux developers to start implementing a
significant portion of userspace in Racket. Though I have some idea how
it might possibly be made to happen, politically, if people were first
ready to commit skilled person-years to particular technical issues. In
the meantime, making linguistically "safe" programs with sufficiently
good performance is a good direction. (I'd prefer to mostly save
"unsafe" for things like numeric-intensive modules that really need
whatever boost, and that are tractably verifiable. If we start doing
unsafe operations on blocks of bytes, for example, without verification,
we probably start recreating many of the same mistakes we'd make in C.)
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