Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 22nd Jul 2007 15:25 UTC
CoreObject is intended to be one of the foundation pieces of Etoile. The current roadmap calls for an experimental version in 0.3, a stable interface in 0.4, and a completely stable version in 0.5. "What is CoreObject? Basically, it's a replacement for a filesystem as a programmer and user interface. Files (in the UNIX sense of the word) never were a good abstraction; an untyped series of bytes is no use to anyone. The operating system needs to deal with things like this, but programmers shouldn't have to. We already have a much nicer abstraction than a file; the object. Unlike files, objects have all of the structure and introspection that we want in order to be able to interact with them programatically. In EtoilE, we want to treat everything as an object, and objects as first-class citizens."
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Member since:2005-07-16
I agree that it's definitely not a new idea, and that there are numerous systems that more or less provide the same functionalities (starting from Smalltalk images nearly 30 years ago). Doesn't mean that it's mumbo jumbo and useless 
, to the contrary... on this particular area, what etoile would like to achieve in the end is probably closer to NewtonOS.
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Member since:
2006-11-28
Sounds to me like naive, metaphorico-maniac mumbo jumbo from the 80s. There are already some solid high level interfaces over stored data : that's what all sorts of database systems are (relational, object-oriented, etc). There are object serialization functionalities in standard APIs of Java and .NET. There are gazillions of file meta-data systems in use for decades, including the well recognized MIME, and several that are to be built int the next versions of Mac OS X, Windows, major Linux desktop environments... There is XML, its DTDs, schemas and namespaces. And anyway, in the big picture, filesystems tend to be abstracted out as just one level of a memory persistence system that seamlessly include everything from L1 cache down to network storage, including local RAM, etc.