Friday, June 1, 2007

Exokernels & Typeclasses

Blahblah sick blahblah tired blahblah giant antibiotic pills blah

Okay, so one thing that I was thinking about a long time ago when I reread the House paper was that the whole notion of the H monad, a restricted version of the IO monad meant for interacting with the OS, was really a lot like a specification of an exokernel.

I don't think the analogy is perfect, but I do think that something like the H monad combined with a plug-ins system for Haskell could actually be used to make something very similar to an exokernel with external libraries providing the real meat of normal OS abstractions to processes.

I need to think about this a bit more.

I also would like to do chunks of the book Computational Category Theory in Haskell, just to make myself sit down and really get comfortable with the way that book approaches the subject. Different takes on familiar subjects are always nice.

4 comments:

shapr said...

Hey, this idea is really interesting, could you expand on that idea?

That is, could you be more explicit about the relationship between the H monad and exokernels?

Anonymous said...

I did convert the ML code to Haskell for Computational Category Theory one time some years ago. Alas, the code has been lost to time, but the good news is that it doesn't take that long and takes very little "thinking".

The approach isn't actually particularly unique, it just is much more concrete than is typical.

As for exokernels, I'm skeptical that it would be that simple.

Antoine said...

C,

Is this the paper you're referring to?

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