MOOSE: other existing projects

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

(ever sorry for broken english)

We still do not know what language to use.
One may think it's a superfluous question, and say that the system should
be language-independent anyway, but actually it is *not*,
as the object semantics of the language will limit the object semantics
of the system.


Language suggestions are
* SELF		a pure OO language
* BETA		a modern OO approach -- BETA is better
* SML		a strongly-typed functional language
* Scheme	an untyped (but run-time checked) functional language
* Sather	an OO language
* Gopher	??
* Oberon	an OO language and system
* FORTH		an untyped low-level postfix functional language


Existing systems or projects that may be worth looking at (or may already be
what we need) are:
* STAPLE	a (persistent (((lazy (functional language)) based) system))
* TAOS		a distributed system with a portable assembler
* Oberon	a OO system
* Amoeba	a distributed OS
* Grasshopper	a distributed OS
* VSTa		a message-passing micro-kernel-based OS


All these do not mean we should just choose one and use it as is and/or
do nothing more (though it may mean it). It means there are already
lots of things done, and we *must* know what is good about them, and perhaps
we should use an existing software and "just" extend it. If nothing is usable,
we'll have to decide everything from scratch (possible, but much more longer to
do, and error-prone).

These lists are of course subject to increase. I'll maintain a better
annotated list of these. It will be available by ftp in
frmap711.mathp7.jussieu.fr in pub/scratch/rideau/moose/papers/comparison.

What we should do is study each of these projects:
for each language/system considered, one of us must study it, and write
a short article about what are the software's (mis)features and lacks,
available implementation, available documentation, and what documentation to
read first to have an idea, and where to get all of these and who to get in
touch with about them.

This means a lot of work. I'll do it, but if I must do it alone, it'll be
a lot of time before the project decides.

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