Crush/BRiX: An Experimental Language/OS Pair

An anonymous reader writes: "Brand Huntsman (the creator of the Bochs Front-End, among other obscure things) has been developing an integrated language/operating system for the past few years now. The Operating System is called BRiX, and it uses a language called Crush, which is woven tightly into the core of the OS. On his project web page he has posted the source code to his preliminary compiler, which runs in Linux and outputs optimized assembly from Crush source code. The Crush language itself is heavily influenced by Forth, LISP, and Ada, and provides strong typing and extensive namespace security." Update: 08/19 00:03 GMT by T : Note, the project page URL has been updated, hope it now works for everyone :)

Comments

Project homepage at sourceforge

[jukal]

As the project homepage linked from the article seems slashdotted already, you might want to browse to the homepage at sourceforge:

"BRiX, like many other operating systems, provides features such as SMP, preemptive multithreading, virtual memory, a secure multiuser environment and an easy to use graphical interface. How it does this and the end result make it very much unlike any existing operating systems. BRiX is a computing environment and not an operating system. It is a combination of operating system and applications all-in-one. "

Slasdotted

[AdamInParadise]

Use the SourceForge page instead http://brix-os.sourceforge.net/

This is very like a Symbolics Lisp Machine

[Animats]

We've seen this before, and it's called a Symbolics Lisp Machine, the ultimate programmer's toy of the early 1980s.

• "The Symbolics-Lisp system software constitutes a large-scale programming environment, with over a half-million lines of system code accessible to the user. Object-oriented programming techniques are used throughout the Symbolics-Lisp system to provide a reliable and extensible integrated environment without the usual division between an operating system and programming languages. All of the system software is written in Symbolics-Lisp."

There you see the basic concepts of Brix and Crush. Symbolics had that in 1984. One of the Symbolics people wrote a post-mortem,"The Lisp Machine: Noble Experiment or Fabulous Failure?", which explains what's wrong with this concept better than I could.

Re:This is very like a Symbolics Lisp Machine

[Animats]

• I have no personal experience with Lisp machines, but Lisp machines didn't have much in the way of protection or "sandbox" type security.

  I did use a Symbolics 3600, the personal computer the size of a refrigerator. Since it was a single-user development system, it didn't need much security. Symbolics never really got the concept that someday, the application might actually run in production.

• The beauty of the Lisp machine was that even the assembly language in the kernel was expressed in Lisp. There was no real separation between the lower-level services of the operating system and the upper-level programming facilities, and all of it was exposed transparently (and with introspection) to the programmer's tools.

  Yup. You could go into the OS with the debugger while running. In fact, you were always in the debugger. If anything went wrong, there you were in the debugger. Usually from within EMACS.

• Another important feature was the integration of the VM with the garbage collection.

  Well, no. Actually, the big problem with early Symbolics software was the lack of integration of the VM with the garbage collection. GC could take 45 minutes of disk thrashing. It was common to reboot rather than let GC run. Eventually, Symbolics fixed this, but it was too late by then.

• Lisp machines were virtually ideal (some would claim still unsurpassed) as developer workstations.

  Not really. They were more like a LISP hacker's wet dream than a useful tool. We got a lot more work done, even in LISP, on Sun workstations and VAXen. The Symbolics environment encouraged endless tweaking, not the writing of solid code.