Apologies if this reaches you twice, I sent this last night but still cannot see it in the archives.
On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 8:00 PM, arnuld uttre <[email protected]> wrote: > > Well, It was sometime ago when Jonathan Shapiro started working on > Coyotos and there was some discussion on mailing lists that Coyotos > may be the next generation microkernel for Hurd. Even for some time before Coyotos was no longer actively developed, it was effectively abandoned by the primary architects of the hurd, due to its support of the so-called non-trivial confinement. > > I kept an eye on the > development of Coyoptos and saw that their expectations for Coyotos > forced them to create a new language BitC; > http://www.bitc-lang.org/ which of course, I really liked > and quite impressed with their efforts. A thought struck my mind that > I can use BitC to rewrite Hurd. I'm not sure what to say but that you are welcome to try :) The significance of BitC was that certain security properties could be proven easier than using proof systems on top of C; a kernel, drivers, and core servers that have the reliability and security features you are interested in may be possible, but you are right that it would really be a rewrite. Unfortunately, there are no great crowds of programmers ready to rewrite the equivalent of a monolithic Unix kernel on demand. I think there are a lot of people still interested in a Coyotos future, but there is no direction to follow, and nobody writing code that I am aware of. As with any free software, people will go where the activity is. If someone started doing something with Coyotos, well, maybe. > > Now, I passionately wanted to use a GNU system but after 25 years the > Hurd is still in its nascent stage and now since Shapiro has joined > M$, he has stopped working on Coytoso anymore: > http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2009-April/001784.html . > Seems like Coyotos shares the same future (never to be finished) as of > Hurd. > Shap has left behind a fairly complete specification for Coyotos - it's not like the work the interested parties did over those seven (?) years just disappeared. And you already have GNU :) William Leslie
