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> From what I can tell looking at the code, Mezzano doesn't have processes, just threads. I'd rather there were no distinction between processes and threads. I

> From what I can tell looking at the code, Mezzano doesn't have processes, just threads. I'd rather there were no distinction between processes and threads. It's artificial. I want to live in a world where processes cooperate to produce useful results for the user, rather than assume other processes are out there to corrupt their data. If there's any memory protection, I'd rather it be a compile-time, rather than runtime check. > Bugs in any part of the system have the potential to catastrophically break everything. It's also terrible for security. Proof-carrying code seems like a better solution than memory protection. > Another issue with having a single global environment backing everything is that you can't easily experiment with changing built-in Lisp functionality without immediately crashing the system. To be honest, I'm not so interested in “experimentation”. (I'm culturally not a Lisper. I like thinking and getting things right before I write code.) I just think concurrency would be a lot simpler if you could pass objects directly between programs written by different people.

titanomachy 10y ago
This seems like a well-articulated point, written with a civil tone. Rather than downvoting, perhaps people could make a counter-argument? The approach of "thinking and getting things right" before writing code might not be common with this audience, but there are fields where it's the only way to work. I think the idea of compile-time safety proofs is interesting. The number of runtime cycles spent on policy enforcement could be greatly reduced. Would it ever be possible, though, to derive such proofs for programs written in "unsafe" languages, or for arbitrary binaries? An OS which only supports one language would be unlikely to be generally useful, although it might provide sufficiently compelling benefits for specialized use cases. I believe MirageOS represents an OCaml implementation of this idea, although it may in fact support other languages.

titanomachy 10y ago

This seems like a well-articulated point, written with a civil tone. Rather than downvoting, perhaps people could make a counter-argument? The approach of "thinking and getting things right" before writing code might not be common with this audience, but there are fields where it's the only way to work. I think the idea of compile-time safety proofs is interesting. The number of runtime cycles spent on policy enforcement could be greatly reduced. Would it ever be possible, though, to derive such proofs for programs written in "unsafe" languages, or for arbitrary binaries? An OS which only supports one language would be unlikely to be generally useful, although it might provide sufficiently compelling benefits for specialized use cases. I believe MirageOS represents an OCaml implementation of this idea, although it may in fact support other languages.