Revisiting old concepts

In an old post I threw out the perspective that typeclasses & exokernels are similar ideas, but I explained it so pithily I think it was more or less incomprehensible. Honestly, even I had to sit & think for a minute to figure out what I meant over a year ago.

The idea wasn't really that profound, but did amuse me a little.

Let's say that you design a type class called Hardware, maybe even require that it be a monad or at least applicative, that includes all of the functionality you'd want from an exokernel, i.e. protection & raw handling of resources. You should also define a set of algebraic properties that you want all of these operations to satisfy in practice.

Any actual instance of this type class that satisfies all of our conditions is an implementation of an exokernel.

Then your libOS, the part that does all the nasty work of management of resources, can be polymorphic over the implementation and only work with the basic protection interface defined by the type class.

This whole business occurred to me a long time ago because of reading the original House paper and their discussion of the H monad. They don't quite take it in this direction, but I think that it seems feasible.

I'm being a little hand-wavy, though, because this isn't something I've
actually tried to make. It just seems like a compelling bit of imagery & possibly a good idea for organizing a kernel.