strangest systems I've sent email from

This has been waiting for a reply for too long... On 4 May 2016 at 20:59, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Well, yes. I know several Amiga fans who refer to classic AmigaOS as being a de-facto microkernel implementation, but ISTM that that is overly simplistic. The point of microkernels, ISTM, is that the different elements of an OS are in different processes, isolated by memory management, and communicate over defined interfaces to work together to provide the functionality of a conventional monolithic kernel. My reading suggests that one of the biggest problems with this is performance. If they're all in the same memory space, then even if they're functionally separate, they can communicate through shared memory -- meaning that although it might /look/ superficially like a microkernel, the elements are not in fact isolated from one another, so practically, pragmatically, it's not a microkernel. If there is no separation between the cooperating processes, then it's just a question of design aesthetics, rather than it being a microkernel. Indeed. And of course at one point it looked like QNX would be the basis for the next-gen Amiga OS: http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/qnxanno.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/07/09/qnx_developer_pleas_for_amiga/ http://www.trollaxor.com/2005/06/how-qnx-failed-amiga.html That seems a bit harsh! :-) Point, yes. But Curtis Yarvin is a strange person, and at least via his pseudonymous mouthpiece Mencius Moldbug, has some unpalatable views. You are, I presume, aware of the controversy over his appearance at LambdaConf this year? E.g. http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/why-it-matters-that-an-obscure-programming… I gather. He did, at one point, express fairly clearly what he wanted. The problem is that he then changed his mind, went off on various tangents concerning designing his own CPU, and seems to have got mired in that. Reminds me of Charles Babbage and his failure to produce a finalised Difference Engine, because at first he got distracted by tweaking it, and later distracted by the Analytical Engine. If he'd focussed on delivering the DE, it would have paid for the AE, and the world would be a profoundly different place today. I do. Honestly, I suspect some of this is down to NIH syndrome, some to jealousy, and some to the fact that Yarvin has an explicit agenda which Stanislav does not share. Everything was glacial once. We've had 4 decades of very well-funded R&D aimed at producing faster C machines. Oddly, x86 has remained ahead of the pack and most of the RISC families ended up sidelined, except ARM. Funny how things turn out. 3.5 decades of investment in x86 has produced some amazingly fast, capable chips. If we'd had 4 decades of effort aimed at fast Lisp Machines, I think we'd have them. Kalman Reti has an interesting presentation on Lisp Machines on Youtube -- if you've not seen it, it's linked from this relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10255276 As he puts it, when Symbolics assembled its own single-chip processor, it achieved a task of such complexity that the only comparable effort he was aware of was DEC's development of the MicroVAX CPU. And Symbolics achieved this with a single-digit-sized development team, whereas DEC had a 3-digit sized team and took several years to do it. We have 64-bit machines now. GPUs are wider still. I think we could afford a few tag bits. It could be. I am not sure that I am competent to judge. But I have in my time talked to a few truly brilliant minds, and often, I find that they are obscure and hard to follow simply because their minds move in leaps that lesser minds such as my own cannot follow. I have read comments that whereas Yarvin's original description of Urbit was so full of his own clever wordage that it was almost impossible to follow, but now, as others work on the wiki pages, it's more human-readable, if less inspiring. Well, yes, it is, but I personally am not terribly interested in what it underpins. I'm just interested because, coming from a very different basis, and working towards totally different goals, he seems to have come to the same conclusions that I had -- and Stanislav Datskovskiy has, among a very few others. Such a convergence of ideas suggests to me that these powerful ideas are in fact possibly correct. I don't understand this. If you mean that, in order to get to saner, more productive, more powerful computer architectures, we need to throw away much of what's been built and go right back to building new foundations, then yes, I fear so. But saying that, a lot of today's productive code is in very high-level languages such as Clojure, Python, Ruby and so on. I see no reason that these could not be re-implemented on some hypothetical modern Lisp-based OS, just as OpenGenera could run C, Fortran and so on. Yes, tear down the foundations and rebuild, but top of the new replacement, much existing code could, in principle, be retained and re-used. I don't think he does. AFAICT from extensive reading of loper-os.org, originally, Dastovskiy's intent was to built a LispM-type OS on x86. Then he got distracted by the potential of things like FPGAs and never came back. Tragic, really. Ah, yes, I'd forgotten about that. Thanks for the reminder. Well, yes, up to a point. But there are signs that things are actually getting done. Besides Urbit, there are: https://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ http://interim.mntmn.com/ https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano On which note, this discussion is interesting for the contribution https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/10gr05/lisp_based_operating_system_q… -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)