Re: Ada-inspired OS/Language

["Marin D. Condic" <not.valid@acm.org>]

It looks interesting. Does this mean that development on AdaOS is ramping
up? Here's one thing I think is an excellent hook: The fact that you are
aiming to make it a distributed system. Figure that there are any number of
geeks out there with two or more old PCs sitting around the house who might
find it really fun to put an OS on them that turned them into a cluster.
That's something kind of unique. Perhaps the more it aims at distribution
and load balancing the more of a niche it will find in industry. If it makes
scaling up a system easy by just plugging in more inexpensive computers, it
could really catch on. Especially to the extent that it can exploit Ada
tasking as a distribution mechanism - "Sure, you can program it in C/C++ but
it'll be easier to exploit parallelism and get better performance if you
just do it in Ada..."

BTW: What theme is driving the naming scheme?

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com

Enabling Digital.
Our Vision is to be the biggest supplier worldwide of digital gateway
technology.
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"Nick Roberts" <nickroberts@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3d6e9cb6.75108980@news.cis.dfn.de...
> On Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:57:24 -0400, "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG"
> <ve3wwg@cogeco.ca> strongly typed:
>
> >Ryan wrote:
> >> An article on Slashdot reads
> >> (http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/08/18/2053259)
> >...
> >> "BRiX, unlike other modern operating systems, does not use hardware to
> >> isolate and protect applications from each other. Instead, it uses a
> >> single address space and relies on a safe-language to generate code
that
> >> will not access memory for which it does not own.
> >
> >Here we go again.. another DOS-like, memory wide open to corruption
> >concept. PC's eventually, with the help of 286 and later got to the
> >point where they could protect processes. Now we've regressed with
> >the palms etc., back to this no-protection model. No matter how good
> >the language is, there will always be occaisions where one process
> >steps on another unless it is prevented from doing so in hardware.
> >
> >This is OK for research. Not good for running systems that must
> >run as firewalls, or central hosts to university students!
>
> This is one reason why BRiX (or Oberon) will not have a tremendous effect
> on the design of AdaOS.
>
> The other main reason is that this type of design appears to preclude the
> possibility of the direct execution of programs imported in machine code
> form. I find this an unacceptable restriction, and I think too many users
> would as well.
>
> By the way, there is a simple overview of AdaOS now available at
>
> http://www.adaos.net
>
> with a pretty diagram if anybody is interested.
>
> --
> Nick Roberts