On 2008-02-07, Samuel Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I say we start with Plan 9 From Bell Labs and work from there.
They have some useful ideas, but the system stinks too much of obsolete and unix... and rats. Everything's a file... great, but could we move past text files with a proprietary syntax, and having to parse them with quick and dirty hacks? How about a more efficient standard structural _binary_ format? For all the pipes too? And the shell, kind of like Microsoft PowerShell, but better? (Instead of piping objects with a display routine among other things, piping structural data with specified stylesheet for display kind of like XML files, but without the inefficient text encoding of XML.) As for the kernel... how about an exokernel? (Or at least what I've understood it to be: basically the kernel provides only memory management, with disk pages handled analoguously like memory pages, abstracting away the actual devices. Even a lot of the memory management is on user-side, with the kernel just verifying claims, or so.) As for security, how about an object capability system (see: EROS, Coytos, CapROS) in user space outside the exokernel? And the user interface beyond the command line? Vis. And so on. I have and there must be more ideas along similar lines, and if one really started spending time thinking about it and unifying them, one might be able to come up with a very nice, clean and flexible design, intead of a random clusterfuck. -- Tuomo
