[cap-talk] Backwater (was: Language-based OS domain separation)

[Marc Stiegler]

Singularity's security architecture, as nearly as I can tell, is
acls-on-steroids-leaping-new-heights-of-complexity; an 18th century
architect from medieval France would immediately recognize it as being in
the tradition of "roccoco". The interprocess communication system looks
overly complicated with no merit that I can immediately identify, though my
opinion of this softened by the observation that promise pipelining is hard
to grok at a casual glance as well (though the merits, I think, are evident
at a glance for pp; my most positive statement on singularity's concurrency
is, "at least it's not threads").

And It is all built on the dotnet virtual machine, which I have never heard
described as "elegant simplicity".  And it is all built with Sing#, a
more-bells-and-whistles version of Spec#, which is itself a more
bells-and-whistles version of C#, all as if C# didn't already have enough
enough bells and whistles for the Rose Parade.

So from here it looks like Singularity suffers the traditional microsoft
disease: pile features on a weak foundation, rather than build a powerful
foundation. This is the traditional risk faced by organizations with
resources: you can spend more resources and get more features. Getting more
power is much trickier, and almost never backwards compatible.

Truthfully, these opinions are based on mere whisps of knowledge. I would be
happy to learn that Singularity is in fact Scheme-like in its elegance,
grace, and beauty :-)

--marcs

On 6/19/07, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 07:49 -0700, Marc Stiegler wrote:
>
> > >From what I have heard, it sounds like the Singularity project folks
> > threw out the simplicity as their first step in development. Of
> > course, once you throw the simplicity away, you can never get it back,
> > and moreover, things that need simplicity as a foundation (like
> > security) can never be right.
>
> This is not consistent with my understanding. Can you elaborate on this?
>
>
> shap
>
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