Down the design trail...

[Mike Prince]

On Thu, 8 Dec 1994, Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:
> unless it relied heavily
> on segments, which it won't, as segments are so slow and costly, and bring
> not much.

I'm curious why you say segments are costly and slow?  And if you don't 
use segments, how do you isolate processes from each other without using
the built in mechanisms provided by the CPU (in this case 386), and still 
be quick?

> It is very important to acknowledge that our system will be expressed in
> some computer language, and that its semantics will thus be limited by that
> of this language.

True for the high-level.

> Unix semantics suck, because they are expressed in C;
> there thus can't be any kind of security or intelligent error recovery under
> Unix;

Not true, it is a poor craftsman that blames his tools.

There are advantages to writing as much as possible in the highest OO 
language, points which I do not have to argue here.  But in the mean time 
we need to work on some low-level implementational stuff, and since 
machine and next up assembly are not as easy to work in as C, I advocate 
C to write our bootstrap stuff in.  It is very portable, I have an 
excellent development environment (Borland C++ 4.0), and we are not 
anywhere near having a spec for our HLL.  We can always rewrite it later 
in the HLL (or LLL).

Remember, every computer runs machine language, and C is just an easier 
way of generating it for the time being.  I know if I said I advocated 
programming the boostrap in machine I wouldn't get any arguments :)

Mike