Linked by J. Scott Edwards on Fri 17th Dec 2004 18:51 UTC
Every hard-core OS aficionado has done it: Laid out a grand scheme for creating the perfect OS. Taking all the best features and attributes from the OSes we love, and making sure to assiduously avoid the pitfalls of the OSes we don't. Maybe our goals were modest, and we just wanted a slightly tweaked version of an existing OS. But sometimes we're feeling ambitious, and we have large, creative ideas for revolutionizing computing. Long-time OSNews reader and contributor J. Scott Edwards just couldn't help himself, and he has set about to not only plan, but to try to build his dream OS.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
First of all, a huge portion of your rant can be summarized as "object persistence." This is and open field of research, and you might benefit to read some of the numerous papers and articles on it. Several languages have some academic or prototype persistence implemented for them including Java, but they are certainly nowhere near what you would need.
There are some implementations that claim to do object persistence that map to an RDBMS (see hibernate.org), but this is not persistence in its purest form. Rather, it is a functional hack.
Also, I'm obviously not a researcher myself so I'm not familiar with the advances in plan9 and Inferno out of Bell Labs. From what little I know, though, they do some of the OS-level things you're talking about as well. Making Limbo objects in Inferno persistent actually sounds like it's there aside from some specific details. Be sure to check them out:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/
http://www.vitanuova.com/
As someone whose interests overlap with some of your ideas, I don't discourage you from trying. But you should definitely prioritize your plan of action to tackle the highest risk features first and work in incremental stages. That way you minimize the chance that a significant problem in a critical component will require you to rewrite everything else and compromise elegance, correctness, or functionality for compatability. Or worse, start over or give up in failure.