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

Re:The Antiportable language

[kasperd]

I don't understand why that posting got rated Troll, except from the slightly offensive language it is a very insightful comment.

By placing the security model in the language rather than the OS design you will get some disadvantages. You will either have to limit yourself to applications written in this single language or loose the security. Of course some kinds of frontends can get other languages compiled into something running on the system. But this is likely to give you some penalty in performance and perhaps other areas as well.

The language is probably usable on other OSes as well, if anybody care to write the necessary compiler and libraries. But you might not get the full benefits from the language.

However the main idea isn't new. Some people seriously believe JavaOS has a future. Generally you get a uniform security model all the way from OS core through library layers all the way up to the applications. You get runtime typechecking, boundary checking, and garbage collection. You prevent half of the possible security problems. And people believe that good JIT compilers can be faster than compiled C code in some areas where runtime code analysis can be used to do optimizations not possible at compile time.