[Info-vax] Reinventing VMS logical names (Fuchsia & Win NT)

[Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake)]

On Thursday, November 9, 2023 at 5:47:38 AM UTC-8, Dan Cross wrote:
> >But NT is an old OS. What about current OS designs? Well, one 
> >thing I've noticed about exokernels, including Google's 
> >Fuchsia, which looks quite exokernel-like to me,
> Hmm, what makes you say that? I find that surprising, and I'd 
> wager that the folks who designed Fuchsia would as, well; 
> probably also the MIT folks who came up with the exokernel idea. 

You're right, that was a bad comparison. The one idea the two have in common is a "libOS" that different programs can use on the same system to avoid library version compatibility issues. But that's not unique to exokernels, or even microkernels (see Snap, Flatpak, and even Docker containers).

> Fuchsia, or more properly Zircon, was designed to be a fairly 
> standard microkernel with a capability-based security 
> architecture. Incidentally, they started from Little Kernel; 
> when they first announced internally at Google, I asked why they 
> hadn't started with seL4, which seemed like the obvious choice, 
> and the answer I got was that they found it very hard to develop 
> applications for seL4, and had more experience with lk. I 
> gathered there were also some interpersonal dynamics at play. 
> 
> There was a bit of an internal debate whether they should write 
> the kernel in C++ or Rust: they chose C++ based on toolchain and 
> language maturity grounds. About 18 months later we started up 
> a new hypervisor project in Rust, and I talked to them about 
> their decision, and they seemed to indicate that if they'd 
> started about a year later they'd likely have chosen Rust over 
> C++. C'est la vie.

Thanks for the context. I suspected the situation was like that. It really is a shame that Ada is so unpopular and "uncool". That language keeps getting better and better and nobody cares or even thinks about it outside of aerospace and military. It's not as if GCC generates bad code or anything like that. Also, it has a lot of great features for embedded systems, including both RTOS and bare-metal programming.