Re: Building a new OS using Ada

[Ivan Levashew <octagram@bluebottle.com>]

Cedric Lannock wrote:
> 
> The first thing I will do is to describe the latest developements in
> computer science, give a description of a vision of a new OS, give a
> short and of course incomplete overview of existing OS that could be
> used a starting point.

Personally, I'd like incremental computation to be incorporated into 
everyday programs.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/tt/research/incremental-computation/derivation.html

Most of the computations could be performed in an incremental manner. 
Rewriting compilers and other tools in an incremental programming 
language might significantly boost performance (at cost of space, of 
course, but it's a good deal).

> These applications are build to highly interoperate with each other.
What do you mean? I haven't noticed a boost of interoperability. It's 
still a heavy task, as it was 10 years ago.

> Each single individual has only a small brain with a very simple
> program but hooking them together by exchanging pheromones when
> touching they can make complex decision within their swarm. We could
> make it similar when developing a new OS.
As a common rule, a trust is a vulnerability.

The only exclusion I can see is F2F darknets, where every peer owner 
knows owners of neighbour peers (and this isn't necessarily transitive).

You could experiment with F2F at the moment. No need to wait a new OS.

As RIAA shuts down torrent trackers and dc++ hubs, people are more and 
more interested in preserving their life style. F2F is the answer. 
Finally, there is no server. Just people's computers and nothing else.

You'd have hard time describing f2f benefits for those who haven't used 
p2p, but p2p is nowadays not uncommon.

> I think the Unix- like OS have shown this concept at all when
> implementing a piping mechanism. Maybe the new OS could enhance it by
> being able to take more complex messages instead of simple streams.

My wishlist:
1. Rowsets
2. Audio/Video streams
3. Loosy structures. Virtually every scripting language have them:
numbers, strings, dictionaries, lists. They are definitelly not 
attributes of strong typing, however, they form a commodity basis. A 
kind of CLD. In abscense of these structures, strings are used, which is 
much worse. They are present both in Core Foundation and Qt, but they 
are not interoperable enough.
XML is probably an overhead. I can hardly remember a programming 
environment with XML nodes serving as data holders in runtime.

> Because a lot of applications are build into browsers the new OS could
> offer a good browser technology making it easy to developers to build
> applications for the new OS because they could take to already
> available software directly to the new platform.
A constantly increasing amount of work.

> --- GNAT was not designed to build stand-alone bootable code. How to
> build it on different devices? ---
> As far as I understood the gcc compiler it should be able to build Ada
> programs also. As gcc runs on a lot of machines it might help to build
> Ada programs for a lot of platforms.
GCC intermediate interface isn't thick enough to provide all the needed 
information about a target platform. Porting GCC isn't enough to port 
GNAT. GNAT requires personal attention.

Maybe someday GCC intermediate interface will be thick enough for Ada 
and Java (Java is also in need of multitasking features). At the moment, 
the extra work is being repeated twice, for GNAT and GCJ (and maybe others).

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