Am 02.06.2011 16:38, schrieb Invisible:
>>> I suspect that an OS is subject to some *serious* network effects. It's
>>> an interesting toy project to write an OS in language XYZ, but once
>>> you've done it, what are you going to use it for?
>>
>> I think a much more important thing than "what [language] is it written
>> /in/" is the question "what is it written /for/".
>
> Now you're talking.
>
>> In case of a Haskell
>> OS I don't know what that would be, but in case of a Java OS it seems
>> plain as hell: Run JVM bytecode. Applications are plenty for that.
>
> Has anybody written anything more substantial than Tic-Tac-Toe applets
> in Java yet?

Java Enterprise applications, anyone?
OpenOffice?
Eclipse?
Minecraft?

Just four examples of non-trivial software from four different domains 
(business software, office software, software development, and gaming) 
that pop to my mind instantaneously.


> That makes you start to think what /other/ kinds of services you might
> want the OS to provide. For example, this whole "a command is a file
> name, and its arguments are strings passed uninterpretted to the
> program" thing. Surely we can do better.

Like, say, passing messages to the program after it has been started?

I don't see much of a point in an elaborate interface to feed parameters 
at the very moment of startup; after all, the program can't evaluate 
them anyway until it has at least "started up a bit", so pushing the 
same information into a message queue seems to be pretty equivalent to me.

Unless, of course, we'd go all the way of allowing programms to pass 
around full-fledged Java objects to children, parents, or any other 
program they happen to have a handle object for.

Of course, to go for cloud computing, passing around objects should be 
transparent, via marshalling and stuff - and in the end we'd probably 
end up re-inventing the Java Enterprise architecture...

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