Re: Broken dream of mine :(

[Michal Suchanek]

Hello

2009/10/5 William Leslie <address@hidden>:

>
> 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