🚀 go-pugleaf

I found mention of an Object Oriented Operating System available from 
the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urban. It is called Choices. I
wondered if anyone from FSF/Project GNU had looked at it as a "choice" for
their OS. If it were possible to use this it might move things along a bit
faster as well as move GNU to a completely OO environment given the support
in upcoming gcc releases for C++ and objective C.

David Williams

Here is the message:

In article <1991Jul8.231455.7589@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, roy@roy.cs.uiuc.edu
(Roy Campbell) writes:

Yes, object-oriented operating systems do exist and we have built one at the
University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana.  Our system is written in C++
and provides applications with an object-oriented interface to the OS.
The kernel is viewed as a dynamic collection of objects whose methods are
protected from access.  Access to kernel objects is provided by a nameserver
which first checks for protection violations.  If access is permitted,
a capability to access the kernel object is granted.
The classes of all objects in the system are also objects and this allows
programs to browse the current configuration of the system.
Inheritance and class hierarchies are used to give abstract interfaces to
system services and mechanisms.  Concrete classes give particular 
implementations of those services and mechanisms.  The abstract classes
represent a standardized interface for building software applications.
Objects can be dynamically loaded into the kernel (or user space).

Our system runs on bare SUN SPARCstation IIs, Mac IIs, PS/2s, AT platforms,
and the Encore Multimax and we have device drivers for several common devices
on those systems.  The system includes VM (even on the SPARC). 
We have file system objects for BSD, System V, MS-DOS
file system layouts.  The file system is memory mapped and supports
persistent objects -- objects whose lifetime exceeds that of the process
that created them.  

Our position is that its possible to build an object-oriented system from the
ground up and if this is done, the system is more consistent and coherent.
Yacc runs twice as fast on our system as under UNIX.  The file system
performs as well as, and sometimes much better than UNIX.
We run parallel applications on the Encore and they perform well too.

Our code has been licensed by various commercial companies for research
purposes.  The license is free.  The system is called Choices.