[movitz-devel] Object sharing between processes

[James A. Crippen]

mikel evins <mikel at evins.net> writes:

> Note, though, that there are some handy features of non-LISP operating
> systems that we would probably like to have (certainly, that I would
> like to have).

Definitely. There's been a lot of innovation in the past fifteen
years. Things like 3D support, user interfaces, filesystems,
networking, and the like. All should be designed from a modern
perspective, not just as a slavish recreation of the old LispM
designs.
 
> One of them that I would certainly like to have is some sort of
> support for security; Symbolics and other LispM systems were quite
> insecure, by design. Anyone could frob anything in any process
> anywhere at any time, which was certainly very handy when developing
> software, but it's not so great when you want to have a system that
> lives on the net or otherwise shares resources with users and
> processes that may not necessarily be trustworthy.

Hear hear! It should be possible, of course, for random processes to
poke at each other, but only if the user really wants it to be this
way. Normally they shouldn't be able to.

Interprocess communication in Unix and similar systems is awful. It's
awful because the processes have no 'insecure' way of poking at each
other without the crock that is shared memory, or the ugliness of
pipes, et sim. If processes are allowed to poke at each other without
restriction, or at least easily through well defined interfaces, then
the person doing IPC gets a big win. However, it's still necessary
nowadays for processes to be somewhat protected from each other. Thus
I envision some sort of ACL like thing that could be part of a plist
in each stack group and accessible globally.

A lot of attention needs to be paid to how threading systems are
implemented in existing Lisps. Also some good examination needs to be
written on multiprocessing on Lispms so that people who don't happen
to own one can learn how it works.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james at unlambda.com> Lambda Unlimited
61.2204N, 149.8964W                      Recursion 'R' Us
Anchorage, Alaska, USA, Earth            Y = \f.(\x.f(xx))(\x.f(xx))