Seeking designs for a capabilities-based multi-user system

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

> At 09:59 AM 7/23/00 , Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> >I also think (and I hope MarkM and some others will chime in on this)
that
> >multiuser stuff is approximately where the boundary starts between what I
> >think of as safe pointers and what I think of as operating systems.

In some sense, an OS virtualizes (minimally) a more primitive virtual
machine.

In my mind, the main difference between an OS and a language runtime is that
in the OS the rubber actually has to meet the road some day. Most of the
safe languages begin with the statement "assume there is an infinite pool of
cells." An OS must deal with the reality that the memory pool is finite in a
semantically sensible way.

This is not an essential difference. I believe that a semantically sound
language runtime could be created without the infinite pool assumption.

shap