Broken dream of mine :(

[William Leslie]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 8:00 PM, arnuld uttre <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Well, It was sometime ago when Jonathan Shapiro started working on
> Coyotos and there was some discussion on mailing lists that Coyotos
> may be the next generation microkernel for Hurd.

Even for some time before Coyotos was no longer actively developed,
it was effectively abandoned by the primary architects of the hurd, due
to its support of the so-called non-trivial confinement.

>
> I kept an eye on the
> development of Coyoptos and saw that their expectations for Coyotos
> forced them to create a new language BitC;
> http://www.bitc-lang.org/ which of course, I really liked
> and quite impressed with their efforts. A thought struck my mind that
> I can use BitC to rewrite Hurd.

I'm not sure what to say but that you are welcome to try :)

The significance of BitC was that certain security properties could be proven
easier than using proof systems on top of C; a kernel, drivers, and
core servers that have the reliability and security features you are interested
in may be possible, but you are right that it would really be a rewrite.
Unfortunately, there are no great crowds of programmers ready to rewrite
the equivalent of a monolithic Unix kernel on demand.

I think there are a lot of people still interested in a Coyotos
future, but there is
no direction to follow, and nobody writing code that I am aware of. As with
any free software, people will go where the activity is. If someone
started doing
something with Coyotos, well, maybe.

>
> Now, I passionately wanted to use a GNU system but after 25 years the
> Hurd is still in its nascent stage and now since Shapiro has joined
> M$, he has stopped working on Coytoso anymore:
> http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/2009-April/001784.html .
> Seems like Coyotos shares the same future (never to be finished) as of
> Hurd.
>

Shap has left behind a fairly complete specification for Coyotos - it's not
like the work the interested parties did over those seven (?) years just
disappeared. And you already have GNU :)

William Leslie