Mirage v2.0: a recap of the new features • Hacker News Board

Re: Mirage v2.0: a recap of the new features

#11

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 6:43 PM UTC

tommd wrote: post #8

ilaksh wrote: post #6

Stupid questions: does Mirage OS allow me to run C or Python programs? Can I run bash or Xwindows or do OpenGL?

While correct, I always find the declaration of Mirage (and HaLVM for that matter) as an OS to be unhelpful. It is a cross compiler for OCaml (resp. Haskell) to the Xen ABI along with libraries for interacting with Xen primitives (inter-domain communication, etc).

Today. Nothing prevents a future version to target hardware directly.

It has been mentioned multiple times that Xen ABI is just away of saving resources to focus on more important areas for the time being.

Re: Mirage v2.0: a recap of the new features

#12

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Jul 22, 2014, 6:47 PM UTC

avsm wrote: post #10

tommd wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While correct, I always find the declaration of Mirage (and HaLVM for that matter) as an OS to be unhelpful. It is a cross compiler for OCaml (resp. Haskell) to the Xen ABI along with libraries for interacting with Xen primitives (inter-domain communication, etc).

Mirage is actually not just the Xen ABI. It includes a frontend that swaps in appropriate implementations of module signatures for other backends. For instance, Andy Ray just got a kernel module target working: http://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/mirageos-devel/201... (when this mode is complete, the network stack module will call directly into the FreeBSD kthread rather than invoking socket syscalls, for examp…

I follow you work with great interest.

I had the fortune of using Oberon/Blue Bottle in the 90's and also some contact with Singularity.

So I am very passionate about OS done in memory safe languages and alternative OS designs outside the UNIX System V model.

Congratulations for the work achieved.

Re: Mirage v2.0: a recap of the new features

#13

Post by scardine » Thu, Jul 24, 2014, 12:05 AM UTC

m0th87 wrote: post #5

scardine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the "Python to OCaml", the result is only 10% faster? Nothing wrong with that but some of the most frequent arguments against Python are related to execution speed, I would expect a bigger difference here.

10x faster* FTA: "The new code is a similar length (slightly shorter), runs around 10x faster, and is statically type checked."

Ouch, I need to schedule an optician to check my glasses prescription. %-)