Re: [9fans] MS Research reinvents Inferno?

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 12:43:27PM -0500, Russ Cox wrote:
[...] 
> The real new research in Singularity is how far they are pushing
> type information into the deepest reaches of the system.

Maybe adapting OCaml to a F# (but IMHO some M$-people
also work on Haskell(?)) has opened the eyes to
such strong typed languages.


> 
> Some of the kernel core (i.e., the low-level assembly, the garbage
> collector, the debugger) is written in unchecked languages,
> but most of it (including, for example, the scheduler and all the
> device drivers) is written in checked languages.  Safe device drivers
> alone would fix a huge fraction of the Windows crashes.

[...]
> All this is toward the goal of reliability and dependability, as they
> clearly state in the introduction.  Inferno and Plan 9 are reliable
> mainly because they don't have many bugs.  Neither actually
> take steps to providing some form of safety guarantees.
> Plan 9 is running C code, and when Inferno is jitting, it doesn't
> insert bounds checks on array references, so it can crash easily too.

There is a small team of people (or was it a single developer?)
working on a Ocaml-bases OS.
So this means: type checking even inside the OS's kernel.

I lost the URl, but somehwere in my Mailfolders it should be
possible to find... (or google asking?).

Ciao,
   Oliver