4 ms·

i think what you're saying is, eventally, OS/kernel/root gets folded into the "application" context.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Yep. Back when I was preparing to take an honours year, I wrote an circulated several project proposals. One was to explore the argument above with a constructive project -- writing a blog[1]. An example I gave for the inner platform effect was the Wordpress file wp-cron.php. It gets called on every request made to Worpdress because WP has no other way to arrange for scheduled tasks to be carried out. So you get a performance hit and your scheduling relies on stochastic sampling. Oh, and it stops working very well when (as inevitably happens) you slather Wordpress with caching. In an OS-up design, you just delegate this to cron. Or plugins. In a standard current design, these can't be isolated. In an OS-up design, you can can make them standalone programs with separate accounts that can't reach into and interfere with the core code. No more broken sites from a PHP error in a hastily-installed plugin. Similarly, you can control their access into the database (instead of having a shared login that all code running in the application shares). And so on, and so forth. [1] I'm happy to forward copies of the proposal. My email is in my profile.
derefr 13y ago
Sounds like Erlang. (You ship a copy of the Erlang VM emulator ("ERTS") with your Erlang application "release", and upgrade the release as a whole, rather than upgrading just the application code.)
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  And indeed, following on from Mirage, there's a project which directly targets the Xen hypervisor: http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/
  - e12e 13y ago
    There's a (dead?) project for doing this with squeak Smalltalk: http://squeaknos.blogspot.no/ http://squeaknos.blogspot.no/ Of course, you could argue that the whole design of Smalltalk with it's VM is already abstracting away the OS... Indeed, some of the advantages from java on the server side is arguably that it has its own VM, so that you don't target the OS platform, but the java platform.

Yep. Back when I was preparing to take an honours year, I wrote an circulated several project proposals. One was to explore the argument above with a constructive project -- writing a blog[1]. An example I gave for the inner platform effect was the Wordpress file wp-cron.php. It gets called on every request made to Worpdress because WP has no other way to arrange for scheduled tasks to be carried out. So you get a performance hit and your scheduling relies on stochastic sampling. Oh, and it stops working very well when (as inevitably happens) you slather Wordpress with caching. In an OS-up design, you just delegate this to cron. Or plugins. In a standard current design, these can't be isolated. In an OS-up design, you can can make them standalone programs with separate accounts that can't reach into and interfere with the core code. No more broken sites from a PHP error in a hastily-installed plugin. Similarly, you can control their access into the database (instead of having a shared login that all code running in the application shares). And so on, and so forth. [1] I'm happy to forward copies of the proposal. My email is in my profile.

derefr 13y ago

Sounds like Erlang. (You ship a copy of the Erlang VM emulator ("ERTS") with your Erlang application "release", and upgrade the release as a whole, rather than upgrading just the application code.)

jacques_chester 13y ago
And indeed, following on from Mirage, there's a project which directly targets the Xen hypervisor: http://erlangonxen.org/ http://erlangonxen.org/
- e12e 13y ago
  There's a (dead?) project for doing this with squeak Smalltalk: http://squeaknos.blogspot.no/ http://squeaknos.blogspot.no/ Of course, you could argue that the whole design of Smalltalk with it's VM is already abstracting away the OS... Indeed, some of the advantages from java on the server side is arguably that it has its own VM, so that you don't target the OS platform, but the java platform.