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I can see it be quite difficult to write a type safe GC if a big part of what makes a language type safe is a GC

There's a paper containing a type-safe garbage collector here. They define a typed assembly language that guarantees safety of memory operations, but is expressive enough to write the garbage collector in. (I must admit that I haven't finished reading the paper yet - I have a big collection of papers I've been meaning to read. )

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Too many Greek letters!! I'm going blind... If only I had the time...

The problem with those scientific papers is that they make it impossible for anybody who didn't have greek at school to read it, let alone ask questions.

Too many funny symbols, I agree. They're not so hard to read once you get used to the notation, though. The standard introduction to this sort of thing is Types and Programming Languages.

I was thinking about a single address space operating system, and I was thinking rather than forcing the use of a restricted language that I could just use the llvm JIT and replace all the bytecode's LOAD/STORE with a memory access check and then do the load store... I am not sure how much of a performance hit that would be.

I am not sure about type safty yet... I figure C is already as type safe as it needs to be without getting in your face...


Oh yeah my first post, I got big ideas but no background... I hope I can provide some nice ideas and hypothetical... I like everyone else has a few cool OS ideas... A while before I have the skills to implement them (if ever) but I enjoy the concepts enough to be fulfilled.

Welcome to the board.

Although I don't often contribute to the heavily theoretical threads, I enjoy reading them. I'm hoping that once my C++ kernel is 'complete', most of the userland stuff will be in type-safe languages (I like C#) so will watch your thoughts with interest.

Cheers,
Adam

I am kind of disappointed with the turn out of type safe langs in the open source world...

I have been following clang (a BSD compiler, that reuses llvm and does not use any gcc code [the current llvm front ends reuse gcc]) and it is writen in a nice modular way, I think the lexer and llvm glue would possibly be reusable for a javascript or c# compilers (or pike or whatever) and all this nice bsd code would allow one to add all kinds of extensions to c like langs in a modular way.