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I’ve written software for a few different Single System Image systems. They are uniformly terrible in my experience because they actively hide material informat

I’ve written software for a few different Single System Image systems. They are uniformly terrible in my experience because they actively hide material information about the system architecture that is critical for software performance and robustness. I wouldn’t recommend them at all — the “benefits” are greatly outweighed by the downsides in real operational environments. There is a reason they disappeared even though they were popular at one time. I thought they were a great idea until I actually used them. It is very difficult to write scalable high-performance software on those types of systems, so many edge cases.

nivertech 5y ago
There are two different things called Single System Image systems: 1. LISP machines, Smalltalk dev environments, etc. A modern example would be the DarkLang. 2. Distributed OS with process migration like MOSIX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image The (1) are a good direction, but they're usually not distributed. I guess you're talking about (2) which was never properly implemented, or maybe they were problematic by design. BTW, what do you think about Inferno and Plan9? They still have hobbyist communities around them, and some of their ideas influenced current mainstream SW like 9P protocol and GoLang channels.