Re: [stack] Concatenative Hardware

On 11/2/07, Rodney D Price <[email protected]> wrote:
> Chris,
>
> This suggestion may be somewhat orthogonal to your memory management
> issue (or not), but it's something I've been interested in
> for some time: Could you build a machine with capability-based
> addressing? That is, instead of building an MMU (not that you said
> you were going to) could you protect a process' memory from other
> processes with capabilities?

Yes I could do that, but I am currently strudying minimalist system
architectures.

> So why do I suggest this for your Cat machine? Cat has a real static
> type system (not just "types"). There's a very interesting
> interaction between capabilities and type systems: if your machine
> had capabilities, the Cat type system might be able to handle memory
> management for you.

So the gain be would be increased safety, correct? Capabilities as I
understand them are essentially dynamically managed permissions. I
haven't yet been swooned by capabilities, but perhaps I just need to
do more reading on them.

Would there be commercial interest in this line of exploration? Right
about now some kind of financial sponsorship would be very motivating.
;-)

- Christopher