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Is it true that they never achieved it? I thought they basically did. You can see the system in action in various talks by Alan Kay.


I would like to see it too, and I even referred to it in a comment a few days ago. Did they release the code or just describe it in papers and talks?

A cursory look at the website and Googling says the latter, which is a shame. The research would be more impactful with source code. There's no reason not to release the source, and if you fail to do so, you can't really complain if practitioners don't pick up those techniques :)

I think OMeta was related and that is released, but IMO it's not that practical.

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Thread from 5 years ago that is not that flattering of their work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325

Oh it actually points to some more source: https://github.com/damelang/nile

Although I think it's easy to pick on different parts; there's definitely value to having a holistic system and design. But it would be better if we could see all of it instead of just the parts


They did basically achieve it. There's one missing component though: the kernel. One big reason kernels have to be gigantic nowadays is the stupidly high diversity of hardware interfaces. Every USB device, every graphics card, network card, printer… has its own peculiar way of talking to the rest of the computer, and that shorcoming has to be compensated by bolting a driver on top. For each OS.

See Casey Muratory on the 30 million lines problem: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031

Solve that, and then ideas from VPRI can shine.


In the meantime, seems like a VPRI system that just runs on a standard virtual machine would be pretty nifty.




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