From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:18:19 +0100 From: Oliver Bandel To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] MS Research reinvents Inferno? Message-ID: <20051213201819.GB593@first.in-berlin.de> References: <1134493372.4921.0.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6i Topicbox-Message-UUID: c4006d68-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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