microkernels

[Laurent Martelli]

>>>>> "Beholder" == Beholder  <beholder@bespin.dhs.org> writes:

  Beholder> Francois-Rene Rideau wrote:

  >> I do agree that the most important point is to have the right
  >> primitives; and that's perhaps what I'd like a no-kernel to be
  >> about: focus the design attention on the semantics of primitives,
  >> rather than on particular implementation mechanisms, that should
  >> be hardware-dependent (which is I think a positive contribution
  >> of exo/nano-kernel approaches, independently from their kernelful
  >> aspect).

  Beholder> What primitives do you suggest?  

I'd suggest something very close to Lisp or Scheme : objects,
functions, you can call functions with objects as arguments and get a
a result, you can define new functions as calls to already defined
functions (lambda). The state of the system should be persistent : if
you shutdown the system, and restart it, you should have the same
state sa before the shutdown. That's all you need I think. (plus a
number of "hardcoded" standard functions such as and, or, if, =, cons,
car, cdr).

-- 
Laurent Martelli
martelli@iie.cnam.fr