why not "C" ...

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

> Well that's fine and nice, but C still has one power that most languages 
> can't come close to matching: everyone uses it.
  If you think we should keep "C" as the system language, then we won't do
anything better than Unix (see the VSTa experience); perhaps we could add
some little functionality to it, that would be added to its bulk (see QNX
real-time capabilities), but it'd be no more useful than actually adding it
to, say, Linux.

  "C" is definitely a bad language. Stop using it. This does not mean
there won't be "C" compilers and/or "C" converters, to port existing
software written in "C". This means that any model of our system using
"C" would be either inefficient, or mean our system is inefficient. I
prefer the former. So to take part of the full power of our system, C
shouldn't be used.


> I'd like to stress the importance of having many different langs 
> supported by the OS.  We shouldn't be dominated by Self, our own 
> language, or whatever, as Next is by objective-c.  Even though we all 
> love to hate it, I'd even propose having C++ support, or at least the 
> ability to.  We could tweak it up so its nice and dynamic, but it should, 
> in theory anyway, be perfectly ok to port C++ to the project....
   We won't be dominated by anything. We'll offer support for any language
(not the same kind of support, though). We can even have most (or
inefficiently, all) of "C" as modules in our language; but our "C", "C++"
compatibility will be upward, not downward: what you can do with "C" and
"C++", you can do it easily in the system.
   For whatever you do, there will still be things easily doable outside
"C"/"C++" and very difficult to do with these, because these languages are
inherantly poor and unpowerful. So either our system does support such
things, and won't be downward C/C++ compatible, or it won't, and it will
suck rocks, and won't be ever better than Linux/POSIX, or W/NT, or OS/2,
or MacOS, or anything.



> Say, for our paging system, might I wonder if it would make sence to kill 
> the swap file idea?  Instead, when a page can't fit in memory any more, 
> it is written onto disk, in the correct place in the object/toolbox.  
> This way, things are more presistant, and you can theoritically pretend 
> to have near-infinate RAM, but it might be a bit slow....

Well, I think we may reformulate it better this way:
let's kill the "file", but not the "swap".


> One last goal I'd like to insert into the hiarchy somehwere (#3?) is 
> reliability.    This is still more important than speed, IMHO.  What good 
> is a persistant system if the persistant data is constantly getting 
> corrupted?

It was so obvious I forgot !
(Resiliance and persistence) are among #[1-3] in the specs !!!



--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
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