The operating system: should there be one?

Stephen Kell

DOI:10.1145/2525528.2525534

Corpus ID: 11805679

The operating system: should there be one?

@inproceedings{Kell2013TheOS,
  title={The operating system: should there be one?},
  author={Stephen Kell},
  booktitle={PLOS '13},
  year={2013}
}

Stephen Kell

Published in PLOS '13 2013

Computer Science

Operating systems and programming languages are often informally evaluated on their conduciveness towards composition. We revisit Dan Ingalls' Smalltalk-inspired position that "an operating system is a collection of things that don't fit inside a language; there shouldn't be one", discussing what it means, why it appears not to have materialised, and how we might work towards the same effect in the postmodern reality of today's systems. We argue that the trajectory of the "file" abstraction… CONTINUE READING

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