Slashdot Mirror
Phantom OS, the 21st Century OS?
jonr writes "Phantom OS doesn't have files. Well, there are no files in the sense that a developer opens a file handle, writes to it, and closes the file handle. From the user's perspective, things still look familiar — a desktop, directories, and file icons. But a file in Phantom is simply an object whose state is persisted. You don't have to explicitly open it. As long as your program has some kind of reference to that object, all you need to do is call methods on it, and the data is there as you would expect."
Yes, yes, very interesting.
Is it volatile? If it is, then no thanks. If it isn't then it must be written to disk, in which case it's simply a regular file with a spiffy interface. Does that interface take up memory? How does it handle locking conflicts? How does it handle paging?
FTFA it's more like a virtualization system that takes constant snapshots of the system states, and reverts to them if there is a power loss or a shutdown or whatever. Fine. Cool.
But TFA skips over (in true Register style) any possible downsides to that. I'm a typical geek. I have 20 things running at any given time. Over time, with a traditional software system, there are enough page faults that when I roll back around to something I opened yesterday, the performance is extremely slow while all the states are being loaded back into active memory (and the states of something I'll need in 5 more hours are being written to disk).
If I'm persisting my whole filesystem in that fashion, there are quickly going to be issues. If I'm not, then there is some bullshit in there somewhere. They may have a fancy file allocation table, they may have some fancy I/O tricks, but their stated abilities are frankly contradictory, because the state is not being maintained, it is simply being preserved, and the difference is only subtle linguistically.
In short, the Phantom OS sounds more like the Phantom game console than anything I'd want to run on my computer.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Oh boy, I can't wait for every application to have to invent it's own directory system to store saved state in, since it can't just use the filesystem to save the file to like in the old days. I bet it will be all kinds of fun to try to get your data from one application into another, especially competitors applications. Not to mention the pure joy that making an incremental backup on this system must be.
This seems like a throwback to old IBM mainframes and PalmOS. It's fine if your users don't mind being more or less locked into their applications and don't want to move data around very much, but it's crappy when they want to do more sophisticated things like compressing and emailing the document they're working on.
In short: This is a compatibility nightmare. There is a good reason full fledged systems don't use it.
I read the internet for the articles.
From what I read, these "objects" are nothing but a fancy new name for files. For instance, if you are writing a program in Python you don't save a file, you pickle an object. Oh, wait, that's exactly what Python is able to do right now, in any OS that implements Python! Doh....
FTFA:
Think of that: you cannot program in C, but you can write programs in PHP or Javascript. How cute! I suppose it supports Logo, right?
So there's something wrong with a dude scratching an itch and having a little fun with it? There was a time when Linux was a niche system that had no real purpose aside from the fun of making it. That seems to have worked out well.
In any case, there are interesting concepts in here that deserved to be explored, and the best way to explore programming concepts is the program them.