

OS/Forth (1998) - fogus
http://www.forth.org/svfig/osf.html

======
stcredzero
The triad diagram with the OS between the user, the hardware, and the software
is especially informative.

    
    
          H    S
           \  /
            OS
            |
            U
    

Why is OS there in the diagram? The OS is just software! Make a compiler
target and programming environment the OS!

This has been done before. Symbolics Lisp machines demonstrate many of the
technical advantages of this level of integration. Unfortunately, they also
show the disadvantageous economics of special-purpose hardware. Most Smalltalk
environments have a _very good_ abstraction of the underlying hardware, which
is the way one can have this level of integration without the special hardware
trap. In fact, you can mostly just treat the VM like it's the CPU. That triad
diagram should really be:

    
    
        Hardware
           |
        Software
           |
          User

~~~
shaddi
What it really should, and does, look like is:

    
    
        Hardware
           |
          OS
           |
        Software
           |
          User
    

Your OS is there to provide protection between programs and provide an
interface to system resources. The OS is "software", I suppose, but it /is/
fundamentally different than, say, your web browser, in that OS code runs in
kernel mode and your web browser runs in user mode. That's a huge difference
in access to system resources, etc.

~~~
stcredzero
_Your OS is there to provide protection between programs and provide an
interface to system resources._

Why can't the _language_ provide those?

 _fundamentally different than, say, your web browser, in that OS code runs in
kernel mode and your web browser runs in user mode_

Having Kernel/User modes is just one way of providing security. There is
nothing really _fundamental_ about it. It just so happens that machines are
mostly organized this way. One could do away with the kernel mode distinction
with a mechanism like capabilities and arguably wind up with _better_
security.

~~~
ori_b
> Why can't the language provide those?

It can. But when it does, it stops getting called a language, and starts
getting called an OS that only supports one language.

Or it gets called programming the bare metal.

~~~
stcredzero
_It can. But when it does, it stops getting called a language, and starts
getting called an OS that only supports one language._

You're either not familiar with some of the technologies I'm discussing, or
you're not getting the point I'm trying to make.

Smalltalk started out as an OS, and even back then, it was fully capable of
supporting any number of languages running on top of it.

 _Or it gets called programming the bare metal._

My point is that this is just a fixed idea without a fundamental basis. That's
just _how it has been_ as opposed to how it has to be. Basically, it's that
way because the field settled in on a particular way of doing things that fit
the limited hardware of the time.

Also, there's no reason why a VM, JIT or otherwise even has to be involved.
Haiku/BeOS is another such creature. It's highly responsive, even on ancient
hardware, and it's highly compact. (Entire OS + apps in well under 200M.)

The OS is a set of abstractions. A High Level Language is another. There's no
universal reason why the latter can't subsume the former.

~~~
ori_b
> The OS is a set of abstractions. A High Level Language is another. There's
> no universal reason why the latter can't subsume the former.

And it has. When this happened, the result was dubbed an OS.

------
mrshoe
Interesting that Bill Gates said, "Microsoft is rewriting all its' application
offerings to use an advanced HTML interface and no longer the current windows
based system," in 1998.

Why are we still not there, 11 years later? Coincidentally, I just wrote a
blog post about this last night:

<http://shoptalkapp.com/blog/2009/10/15/the-real-web-os>

------
joubert
Article from 1998. (I hate it when a post doesn't show date/time at top of
article).

------
tibbon
So what ever happened to these ideas and Forth?

