As opposed to other kernels and microkernels – probably –,
MH is based on a completely random ideology, picked arbitrarily,
in a Cambridge pub, after evidently too many beers.
Unimpressed by the lack of shape in modern software, some day in 2014
I thought that it would be really cool to build a system made of
tangible abstractions. A system described in terms of objects that can
be very easily understood would be – I decided – very pleasant to play
with, and to use as a base for complex systems!
"MH is free software" and there's a link to GNU, but I don't see an actual license anywhere.
"it is possible to use NetBSD drivers, filesystem and other code in userspace to driver real hardware, it has a complete libc in userspace, Newlib, and has a really useful native runtime system, libmrg" - that is promising, even though there are notes about this still being early / not useful, etc.
> Now that we have multiple external projects, like rumprun-mrg, and a strong interest in adding more ports for the mh userspace, it make sense to have a place to have all MH related code.
Yes, I planned to move and continue development to mhsys.org after I needed to have multiple repositories. Having said this, I have a few outstanding patches that fix the tool chain building — a change got lost in the split.
Thank you for your interest btw; this was completely unexpected and a rather pleasant surprise!
Development is currently stalled mostly for personal reasons, but I am more than available to help and answer questions to anyone interested in it.
It can be an interesting evolution of Unix "everything is a file". This potentially simplifies everything - threading, signals, pipes, asyncronous I/O.
I have the impression that Microsoft tried to do everything is a device in post-NT systems but I can't remember the details.
There Are No Things. [0] ... only actions and properties. Everything is an actor [1].
In his Turing lecture, Robin Milner wrote [2]:
Now, the pure lambda-calculus is built with just two
kinds of thing: terms and variables. Can we achieve
the same economy for a process calculus? Carl Hewitt,
with his Actors model, responded to this challenge
long ago; he declared that a value, an operator on
values, and a process should all be the same kind of
thing: an Actor.
This goal impressed me, because it implies the
homogeneity and completeness of expression ... But it
was long before I could see how to attain the goal in
terms of an algebraic calculus...
So, in the spirit of Hewitt, our first step is to
demand that all things denoted by terms or accessed by
names--values, registers, operators, processes,
objects--are all of the same kind of thing; they
should all be processes.
And now today Hewitt's elusive true mythical Actor model may have finally been realized and embodied in a language called Pony [3].
