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Unix is fairly uniform, and not object-oriented. Plan9 is even more uniform and still not object-oriented. Lisp machines did not feature too much of an OO neith

by sklogic 11y ago

Unix is fairly uniform, and not object-oriented. Plan9 is even more uniform and still not object-oriented. Lisp machines did not feature too much of an OO neither, and yet had a very unified interface to all the OS entities. Other than that, OS research is nearly dead anyway, nothing interesting happens, besides probably Singularity, which is also not very OO - it does not play well alongside with static analysis anyway.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Unix is fairly uniform Hahaha. No. Compared to Windows, maybe, but in the grand scheme of things it is not. Hence so many research systems like Amoeba, Spring, Sprite, SPIN and even GNU Hurd that tried to create a general overarching metaphor across Unix's not-quite-uniformity. Plan9 is even more uniform and still not object-oriented. 9P is a transport-agnostic object protocol for representing resources as synthetic file systems. The trick many have with Plan 9 is that they import their prior knowledge of what a "file" is, but in reality Plan 9's concept of a file is quite different from other systems. This is right down to the Plan 9 kernel being a multiplexer for I/O over 9P. Either way, my point is the "object" metaphor isn't really all that specific. Personally I'd love to see work on functional operating systems, but other than the boring House system, I don't think there's been that many.
- sklogic 11y ago
  > Either way, my point is the "object" metaphor isn't really all that specific I still don't see how Plan9 is built on "objects". > functional operating systems I doubt functional metaphors are of any use in this domain. My point is that the abstraction continuum is far more diverse and deep than something as stupid as communicating objects or reducing lambda terms. My bet is on a linguistic abstraction, which covers interface unification as well as many other things.

by sklogic 11y ago

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Unix is fairly uniform Hahaha. No. Compared to Windows, maybe, but in the grand scheme of things it is not. Hence so many research systems like Amoeba, Spring, Sprite, SPIN and even GNU Hurd that tried to create a general overarching metaphor across Unix's not-quite-uniformity. Plan9 is even more uniform and still not object-oriented. 9P is a transport-agnostic object protocol for representing resources as synthetic file systems. The trick many have with Plan 9 is that they import their prior knowledge of what a "file" is, but in reality Plan 9's concept of a file is quite different from other systems. This is right down to the Plan 9 kernel being a multiplexer for I/O over 9P. Either way, my point is the "object" metaphor isn't really all that specific. Personally I'd love to see work on functional operating systems, but other than the boring House system, I don't think there's been that many.

sklogic 11y ago
> Either way, my point is the "object" metaphor isn't really all that specific I still don't see how Plan9 is built on "objects". > functional operating systems I doubt functional metaphors are of any use in this domain. My point is that the abstraction continuum is far more diverse and deep than something as stupid as communicating objects or reducing lambda terms. My bet is on a linguistic abstraction, which covers interface unification as well as many other things.