I find it problematic that even at times when I’m avoiding computing outside of work, I still have ideas about things I would like to try out or improve in computing “if I had the time”. I tend to capture these somehow – usually written notes in paper or Evernote, and my personal technology radar.
Why might this be a problem? Isn’t having ideas good, and fun? Well it is, but with each comes guilt that I could be making progress on it but am not. Even when that’s my choice, when I deliberately put more effort into relationships with friends or musical projects or whatever, there’s still that nagging feeling that I’m leaving behind chances to make positive changes to computing.
My approach to addressing that started by building the radar. Now I don’t have a lot of different projects I could be working on but am not; I have a single related web of issues, and progress on any one thing counts as progress toward the whole.
The second change is to note that any progress is progress; sometimes I spend some time reading and make a sentence or two of notes on dealing with a problem. Sometimes I try a solution, find difficulties with it and write down that I discount that solution. If I’ve made some move forward from where I was before I’ve started, I can be satisfied and don’t need to burn the midnight oil to get a complete solution to a complex problem done before putting it down.
All of that goes toward describing the limited progress I’ve made on my current research topic, which is distributed message-passing. I like the idea from Erlang that objects run in separate contexts, completely decoupled except for passing messages between one another. This seems to be the best implementation of an object-oriented runtime environment, except that it is all done on the Erlang VM and in the couple of relatively esoteric languages that target it.
On the other hand, while Objective-C doesn’t make it easy to do that decoupling, it does have a very simple message-passing interface that can be implemented in any language with a C FFI. If you can wrap objc_msgSend or objc_msgLookup and expose it to your language runtime, you too can pass messages.
Why can’t we have both of these things? Why can’t we have the simple-to-integrate message interface that can work anywhere, along with the distributed and decoupled objects?
My theory is that Mach makes this possible so I’ve been investigating it using GNU Mach and the GNU HURD. Much of the documentation of Mach messaging uses name servers that register named ports for clients to find; this is how macOS, NeXTSTEP, OSF/1 and related systems work. HURD does not use a name server, it uses the filesystem: you attach a server to a file system node as a translator and clients find the ports by looking up their paths on the filesystem.
I found examples of filesystem translators in the HURD documentation, but they typically were examples that implemented the filesystem messages: seek, read, write, and so on. One could build message-sending on top of filesystem operations but it would not be pleasant:
- marshall the message selector and arguments into some stream format
write()your message to the node- verify that you wrote as many bytes as you expect
read()the length of the reply- verify that you read as many bytes as you expect
read()the reply- verify that you read as many bytes as you expect
- unmarshall the reply into an object of the correct type
Let’s be clear, all of this needs to be done, but it’s all already being done at the Mach message layer and hidden behind the MIG abstraction, so why should our clients and servers do it again in another abstraction built on top? I wanted to find a way to register a port that accepts non-filesystem messages using the HURD’s filesystem-as-name-server approach.
This morning I decided to look at how login was implemented on the HURD and discovered that the password server does exactly what I need. It is configured as a translator on the filesystem, and uses the trivfs library to check in with the bootstrap server and get its ports, but then it handles its own messages for checking passwords rather than the standard filesystem messages. Discovering that gives me enough new information to feel I’ve made progress, and a clear next step (pardon the pun).
