Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems • Hacker News Board

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#11

Post by edf13 » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:02 AM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #10

v1ne wrote: post #8

I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…

Isn’t this the same idea behind unikernels?

That’s what this is…

> MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms.

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#12

Post by ReleaseCandidat » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:15 AM UTC

BrittonR wrote: post #9

v1ne wrote: post #8

I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…

Isn’t that the aim of webassembly?

Not really, as the filesystem you access from Webassembly needs to be in a sort of sandbox or container too.

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#13

Post by ReleaseCandidat » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:17 AM UTC

sprobertson wrote: post #6

I'm intrigued but your site gives me little to go on, I feel like I'm missing a big "what this is" page

Well, they say it's a unikernel (construction kit) in the first paragraph. Of course that doesn't help much if you don't know what a unikernel is ;)

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#14

Post by rapsey » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:19 AM UTC

v1ne wrote: post #8

I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…

> there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes).

Pretty big except though.

This concept has been done multiple times and has always failed. It's solving a problem that few care about.

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#15

Post by xlii » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:21 AM UTC

Personal pet-peeve (from Requirements page):

> (…) They should build on any modern UNIX (or macOS) system with OCaml and OPAM installed. (…)

I just checked. MacOS Sonoma is STILL UNIX certified, and I get that wording “any modern UNIX” would not be clear this minor error annoys me.

s/or MacOS/including MacOS/

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#16

Post by repelsteeltje » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:24 AM UTC

Osiris wrote: post #10

v1ne wrote: post #8

I'm really sold on the idea: Instead of a full-blown OS, you compile your application with a thin layer of support libraries that provide the OS features that your application needs (network, I/O) and that talks to a hypervisor. I mean, if your application runs in a virtualized environment, there's little need to SSH into the system in the first place (except for debugging purposes). Thus, why bother with a full-blow…

Isn’t this the same idea behind unikernels?

Mirage is a unikernel.

The catch here is Ocaml. You can design your unikernel "bare metal" in any way you want and make it do nothing but the essentials you need ... and design it in any language you want as long as that language is OCaml.

Re: Mirage – A programming framework for building type-safe, modular systems

#17

Post by hexmiles » Fri, Nov 24, 2023, 8:29 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #7

Is that similar to Firecracker?

If I understood it correctly, is more like something to run inside firecracker. Is like a toolkit to build a really small os to run a single application, that then you run on top of a hypervisor.