For the last few weeks, my when-I-get-to-it project has been machoo, which is sort of an object-oriented system on the HURD but mostly an excuse to learn about how Mach messaging works.
I decided to build a Smalltalk-style “give me any old selector, and I’ll do something with it” messaging system on Mach, which is already a messaging system. I don’t yet know whether this is a good idea, but I like the design principle of highly loosely-coupled objects telling each other the names of the things to do.
The substrate for this system is MIG, the Mach Interface Generator. It takes descriptions of routines in an IDL that include the names of the supported routines and the argument names, types and return types. It’d certainly be possible to build each message I want to be able to send as a MIG routine, but then the client would have to import interfaces for every type it wanted to use: no bad thing, and many OO systems work that way, but not what I want.
MIG generates a ‘demuxer’ function that examines a message sent to a port, and dispatches it to a handler to the named routine. As an aside, it is highly likely that I’ve got one to many layers of indirection; that if I wrote my own function to take the place of the demuxer I could handle dispatch there without receiving arguments from a dispatcher to do more dispatch. OK, I could, but I don’t currently know how.
So what I ended up with is a two-level system, something like Smalltalk or ObjC. A “class” is a HURD translator registered on the filesystem, you send the zero-arguments message machoo_create_object to the class and get a send right to the new object. This is two-level in that if you need to initialise the object, you would then send an init message to the created object. Objects are messaged using the machoo_msg_send routine, which takes a string selector like Smalltalk.
There’s currently exactly one implementation of a class, a do-nothing null object class. It does the thing that I would extract out into a pattern for other classes: its response to a machoo_create_object message is to spawn a new thread to back the new object. So it’s like an Erlang-style system where each object has its own execution context, except that task switching is handled by the kernel rather than some virtual machine. All of the objects of a class are in a single task, and they are each on their own thread.
I still need to solve some problems, like how to return a reference to ‘this object’ from a message. I need to build more than one class of object, and extract out the common parts of class-ness so that a new class is only defined by its response to messages. So far this is proving to be an interesting and educational project.
