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MCP Run Python

(github.com)
173 points xrd | 5 comments | 15 Apr 25 11:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.858s | source
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behnamoh ◴[17 Apr 25 15:27 UTC] No.43718268[source]▶
So their method of sandboxing Python code is to spin up a JS runtime (deno), run Pyodide on it, and then run the Python code in Pyodide.

Seems a lot of work to me. Is this really the best way to create and run Python sandboxes?

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1. kodablah ◴[17 Apr 25 21:23 UTC] No.43722369[source]▶
There just aren't good Python sandboxing approaches. There are subinterpreters but they can slow to start from scratch. There are higher-level sandboxing approaches like microvms, but they have setup overhead and are not easy to use from inside Python.

At Temporal, we required a sandbox but didn't have any security requirement, so we wrote it from scratch with eval/exec and a custom importer [0]. It is not a foolproof sandbox, but it does a good job at isolating state, intercepting and preventing illegal calls we don't like, and allowing some imports to "pass through" the outside instead of being reloaded for performance reasons.

0 - https://github.com/temporalio/sdk-python?tab=readme-ov-file#...

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2. achierius ◴[17 Apr 25 23:52 UTC] No.43723510[source]▶
Out of curiosity, why did you need a sandbox if you didn't have any security concerns?
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3. necovek ◴[18 Apr 25 11:20 UTC] No.43726969[source]▶

  > but it does a good job at isolating state, intercepting and preventing illegal calls we don't like
Sounds like they put the reason just there.
4. kodablah ◴[18 Apr 25 13:10 UTC] No.43727756[source]▶
Sibling quoted the proper part. It's to help people keep code deterministic by helping prevent shared state and prevent non-deterministic standard library calls.
5. fzzzy ◴[18 Apr 25 13:56 UTC] No.43728142[source]▶
At least we have subinterpreters now. Even if they are slow that is a really good thing.