Hello 2009/10/5 William Leslie <[email protected]>:
> > There is another reason, which is that the environments provided by > some languages simply feel much nicer than that which unix provides. > The filesystem, for example, feels like a duplicate object model, with > less transparent support from the (most?) language. Given the > distance some languages allow you to get from the operating system, > moving from the status quo to fine-grained objects the user can > interact with seems possible only when arbitrary, self-describing data > structures and functions become the axioms out of which the system is > composed. The Hurd has bought us a long way here : it looks like it > would not take much to publish functions and objects for use from > other programs with pyhurd; going from there to transparent sharing of > functions and data does not seem like much of a stretch, but this > would be more obvious in a system engineered around language / vm > level sharing, rather than process / application level. > > The impression I am trying to give here is that the sort of > interactivity that Antrik talks about in his post[1] on Deep Mehta may > be much more applicable when there is less distance between objects > and functions as the system sees them and objects as the application > developer sees them. > The Deep Mehta project is very interesting, thanks for sharing the link. It also makes my earlier point clear: POSIX is ancient technology. It's not like we can't learn anything from studying ancient things but it's not like we want a replica of ancient society to live in, either. It looks like a pure capability system without a POSIX blanket over it would be a better match for the Deep Mehta desktop than the Hurd/mach which forces POSIX to all user accessible interface where forcing it is possible. Thanks Michal
