inferno programmer's notebook

NAME lab 88 - degrees of freedom NOTES The Vitanuova downloads page has historical snapshots of Inferno source from 1996 to 2003 containing all three editions before Inferno went open source. I was curious to see how well Inferno has sustained a standard set of interfaces over the last ten years so I downloaded all of them and poked around. The biggest overall change came with 4th edition, when many parts of the system were upgraded, including the Styx protocol, several builtin modules, dis format, the limbo language and VM. Also, significantly, Inferno adopted open source licenses granting developers the freedom to modify any part of the system: something that might impact sustainability for good or ill. While every edition prior to 4th has had some interfaces changed, these changes did not break backwards compatibility. A 3rd edition emu can run dis code from the 1st edition archive. The difference between 3rd and 4th was large enough that limbo code needed to be ported,...

NAME trainspotting NOTES I want to tell you about my new hobby. I've started to collect inferno emulators. It's a little like trainspotting where the aim is to "spot" a certain type of emulator compiled to run for a particular platform. You get points for running the emulator yourself and bonus points for building the emulator yourself. Unlike trainspotting, I've come to think this hobby might not be completely pointless. So far my collection is not large. I can only claim to have run hosted emu on Plan9, MacOSX, Linux, Solaris, and Nt. Even so, I'm proud of it and would like to add more hosts. Imagine for a moment a collection of emulators that runs on every host, past and present, and with the social organization to port it to all significant future hosts. Wouldn't such a collection be valuable to others? For example, say you are interested in digital preservation, if you could write a program in limbo to interpret your special file format this col...

NAME biomimicry NOTES The acme-sac tarballs I've been working on producing are intended to be compact, contain all the source, and be runnable once it is unpacked at its destination. The complete copy of it's own source means it can grow and adapt to its own environment. It can also create and host the tarballs of itself, thereby replicating and dispersing itself. This structure makes me think of spores. The running acme-sac instance on my laptop is creating spores which I'm casting out from my laptop across the internet hoping that new copies will unpack in fertile soil and form new living cells that themselves can grow and reproduce. This analogy is not new. And there are books on biomimicry for subjects other than computing. The question I have is, if the analogy is followed further and more explicitly what will be the results? Or put another way, should large software systems intentionally use biomimicry as a architectural solution? Alan Kay has used t...

NAME bazaar development mode NOTES I've created a new group for Acme:SAC development. http://groups.google.com/group/acme-sac acme-sac@googlegroups.com The purpose is to develop acme-sac in the open by following the bazaar development model; all code changes are submitted as patches through the list; frequent releases of tarballs; and releases of both stable and experimental trees. Hopefully this means developers maintaining their own trees can cherry pick patches from the list. It doesn't require synchronization through source control system or membership to any project. For example, if you maintain your own inferno-os tree and see a fix you want, you can just apply the patch from the email using gnu patch. All that is required for someone to contribute is a download of an acme-sac tarball , a diff of their code change and email the list.

NAME software temples NOTES I've been listening to the seminars about long term thinking from the Long Now Foundation. I highly recommend them. The purpose of these seminars is to encourage long term thinking. They succeed at that. For the last few weeks as I've been listening to them I've been contemplating the future of software and the history of civilization. I can't say that I've ever been interested in history. But after attempting to look forward more than 100 years it only now occurs to me what a good idea it is to look backwards far enough to see the patterns and cycles in human history. Some of the seminars are inspiring. Danny Hillis talks about his progress in constructing a clock that will run for 10,000 years. At first it sounds insane, but after listening to him I can't help but admire him and what he's doing. The real purpose of such a scheme is to trick yourself into a different kind of thinking. Similar to the idea of forcing change ...