The problem of general OSs is: we have unsafe code, so what we do to deal with it?. The usual option is the isolation trough virtual addresses so that every pointer address is virtual. This imposes cost in task switching and pointer handling. The singularity alternative seems to be to check the managed code for pointer violations at installation time.

In singularity they pretend to extend the reach of types, defined in .NET at the assembly level for inter program and inter language safety, to the OS level for runtime safety. This goal is interesting, because a well defined type system, without unsafe operations permitted, managed at the OS level could permit pure code to run wildly in real memory very fast, for example. With effects defined in the type system the advantages may be greater.

2010/7/31 Tim Matthews <tim.matthews7@gmail.com>

SPJ and probably many others are actually employed at Microsoft research centers. It looks like Microsoft just hasn't been able to find a suitable spot to push Haskell. Haskell influenced F# because they needed a functional language that targeted CLR, and included OO and mutable data.

IMO Haskell is even better than their languages

Maybe so but singularity actually provides the whole os apis via clr interfaces compared to mainstream windows os where the underlying apis are all in C, C++ and COM. The common intermediate language is not tied to any specific programming language such as C# or VB, it's more generic than that, and has it's advantages. Safety is something they wish to achieve but afaik their main goal is to write an OS in managed code.

Haskell does provide a safe runtime but afaik unlike the clr it's tied to the haskell language. I think there has also been some attempts to write an OS in haskell too though, but that's another story...

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