In putting up https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/665, I discovered
that the `expanduser` crate does not compile on Windows. Looking into
it, we do not seem to need it because we were only using it with a value
that was passed in via a command-line flag, so the shell expands `~` for
us before we see it, anyway. (I changed the type in `Cli` from `String`
to `PathBuf`, to boot.)
If we do need this sort of functionality in the future,
https://docs.rs/shellexpand/latest/shellexpand/fn.tilde.html seems
promising.
As described in detail in `codex-rs/execpolicy/README.md` introduced in
this PR, `execpolicy` is a tool that lets you define a set of _patterns_
used to match [`execv(3)`](https://linux.die.net/man/3/execv)
invocations. When a pattern is matched, `execpolicy` returns the parsed
version in a structured form that is amenable to static analysis.
The primary use case is to define patterns match commands that should be
auto-approved by a tool such as Codex. This supports a richer pattern
matching mechanism that the sort of prefix-matching we have done to
date, e.g.:
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/5e40d9d2211737f46136610497bcd9a8271009e0/codex-cli/src/approvals.ts#L333-L354
Note we are still playing with the API and the `system_path` option in
particular still needs some work.
As stated in `codex-rs/README.md`:
Today, Codex CLI is written in TypeScript and requires Node.js 22+ to
run it. For a number of users, this runtime requirement inhibits
adoption: they would be better served by a standalone executable. As
maintainers, we want Codex to run efficiently in a wide range of
environments with minimal overhead. We also want to take advantage of
operating system-specific APIs to provide better sandboxing, where
possible.
To that end, we are moving forward with a Rust implementation of Codex
CLI contained in this folder, which has the following benefits:
- The CLI compiles to small, standalone, platform-specific binaries.
- Can make direct, native calls to
[seccomp](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/seccomp.2.html) and
[landlock](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/landlock.7.html) in
order to support sandboxing on Linux.
- No runtime garbage collection, resulting in lower memory consumption
and better, more predictable performance.
Currently, the Rust implementation is materially behind the TypeScript
implementation in functionality, so continue to use the TypeScript
implmentation for the time being. We will publish native executables via
GitHub Releases as soon as we feel the Rust version is usable.
Ryan Ragona