Re: [DotGNU]Inferno Papers

[Rhys Weatherley]

David Sugar wrote:

> Distributed systems os research and development has certainly been
> stifled by a lack of a free implimentation.  Imagine if QNX had been
> available as free software.  This demonstrates just one of the ways
> closed research is both bad science and prevents real innovation from
> happening.

Yep.  I agree.

We may be able to pick Inferno's brains for some interesting
stuff though, while avoiding using the Inferno code directly.
"Styx" is a distributed filesystem; "Limbo" is a programming
language designed for distributed environments; Dis is a
distributed virtual machine; etc.

I'm looking at Limbo at the moment: it shouldn't be too hard
to add it to cscc, and compile it to IL/JVM.  It's quite a nice
language.  Kind of a "Modula-C" with integrated comms
channels.

Dis is kind of interesting: it's an abstract register machine.
I think the same affect can be achieved in DotGNU with IL
plus an appropriate set of libraries to handle lists, tuples,
channels, etc.

I'll leave Styx to someone else to analyse.

Cheers,

Rhys.