work ahead...

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Joyous Tunespeople,
   it seems indeed that we have some scheduling problem. We can't seem to
communicate well enough to have any real common work getting done.
Anyone has any methodology to propose (not the administrative details,
but just the real-world things) ? Currently, I've received little help
in setting up the ideas in the WWW pages, and received little feedback.
Sure we shall codevelop the HLL and real applications using it (unless
one can find a language satisfying the creteria, of weaken these while
still maintaining the system's coherency).


   I've released not very proudly 0.0.0.14 (no patch over 0.0.0.13, just the
archive at ftp://frmap711.mathp7.jussieu.fr/pub/scratch/rideau/Tunes/)
that includes mainly more pointers added to WWW pages
(there is definitely a lot to read on the internet), with some changes to the
TUNES homepage, and a major reorganization of the few that exists for the LLL
sources.


   Among the pointers added, there's some Aegis project in MIT about some
"ExoKernel" architecture that is very similar to my no-kernel concept
(and opposite to the micro-kernel fad) and yields services much more flexible
and faster (10 to 100 times) than a monolithic kernel (Ultrix) on same
machine.
   I'm sure semi-automatic partial evaluation in the whole system
(instead than just manual partial-evaluation in the system library)
could yield far better results. This only confirms results by other
teams (e.g. Apertos) that did the same kind of experiments but not
with unix-like systems.

   Actually, I've much more read than written these weeks.
My conclusion is that there is definitely a place for our project,
that tries to put together innovations most of which were already implemented
separately elsewhere, plus its own that weren't (active annotations), into a
coherent system, whereas previous implementation of these (persistence,
distribution, exokernel, partial evaluation, dynamic scheduling,
self-extensibility) were isolated and out of synch with other parts of the
system.


   So there's a lot of work ahead, but it seems to be useful work.
Anyone can propose any kind of organization to actually do common work ?


   P.S.: here are topics we could discuss:
* how manage object identity, consistency, and resource-share with
 dynamic active annotations ?
* What syntax for the HLL ?
* Who is willing to participate in writing the GC (garbage collector) ?
* Who is willing to participate in the OTOP (over unix) implementation ?
* Who is willing to participate in the i386 (over raw PC hardware)
	implementation ?
* Is there any problem with using some mostly ANS FORTH as a LLL ?
* What preliminary bytewise encoding to use for interchanging
 objects over the net ?


--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
Join the TUNES project for a computing system based on computing freedom !
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