[Barrelfish] [Barrelfish-users] sosp paper

[Timothy Roscoe]

Dear Chris,

Squeak would indeed be nice, but we also have a variety of other 
runtimes we would like to port to Barrelfish.  Since our main focus is 
on research, we are likely to concentrate first on those for languages 
with "interesting" concurrency properties (such as transactional 
Haskell, or SQL...).

Note that Barrelfish is also not quite ready for prime-time right now, 
so it's not quite true that we get lots of applications for free by 
porting a runtime.  In particular, we don't yet have full-featured 
network, disk, or file-system support.  The API is also (deliberately) 
very different from Windows or Linux.

All this complicates getting a runtime working (though trying to do so 
does make it clear what's currently missing!).

Best regards,

  -- Mothy


Christopher Hogan wrote:
> I was just reading the SOSP paper and I noticed in section 5.5 the
> comment "In particular, this evaluation does not address complex
> application workloads".
> 
> The first thing that came to mind was why don't they just port the
> Squeak VM to Barrelfish.  Though I have not tried it myself,
> apparently the windows and linux ports only took a few weeks to have
> a working system.  After that you would have all sorts of
> applications available such as web servers or possibly 3D multi-user
> online applications (i.e. Croquet) that could be used for workload
> testing.
> 
> http://www.squeak.org/
> 
> Chris Hogan