
Sun Labs Lively Kernel, Smalltalk like programming using JavaScript - jacquesm
http://research.sun.com/projects/lively
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BigZaphod
This has been around awhile and was done in large part by none other than Dan
Ingalls himself. :)

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futuremint
Running an entire application environment in the browser like this still gives
me pause for concern. On the one hand it'd be great for creating an open
community where anyone could modify the code (locally) to do cool things, on
the other hand it makes it a lot more difficult to control security if there
is a server involved in the mix.

And if there isn't a server involved... what's the point of using a browser
then?

So this is a neat technology exercise... but to what end?

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andreyf
_So this is a neat technology exercise... but to what end?_

To replace operating systems with languages and VM's. Dan Ingalls, the
principal researcher behind Lively, is one of the Smalltalk elders. He
believes " _an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into
a language. There shouldn't be one_ ".

See:
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.h...](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html)

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gaius
VMs running... operating systems?

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stcredzero
The Lisp machines did this. Smalltalk was designed first as such a beast. If
you look at really old Smalltalk images, you can find the vestiges as four
primitive hooks: one for lifting the drive head, one for putting it down, one
for moving it in, the other for moving it out.

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stcredzero
Suggestion for a "web os." Take this, or something like it, and put in on an
OS where each tab is its own process. Need to install OpenOffice? Fine, but it
runs in a "tab." Of course, you can also do some Exposé trick with the tabs.
(Isn't the "most visited" page in Chrome and Safari just a sort of web
substitute for Exposé?)

Then make a server version! A company with a software toolkit like this could
have a key advantage. They could wind up with OS that are 50X more compact,
more responsive, yet require fewer resources, while having faster development
times and much greater code reuse.

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coliveira
isn't this one of the goals of the Chrome OS?

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stcredzero
I hope so!

