Gemini Protocol?

[phschafft]

@SamuraiCrow

Ironically, just before we divorced, I suggested that something like ChromeOS but better, that would route the redundant OS functionality through the browser instead of the other way around would be acceptable. It would be a solution that is almost as elegant and efficient and less obtrusive than trying to eliminate the worst of the duplication within Internet standardization, while making the whole system lighter and streamlined in the process.

It is an interesting idea. For some project of mine (some my know ;), I’m very strongly on the “no two codes on the same machine should do the same, not even if implemented in different languages” side. Which is a bit an extreme view of this.

From my understanding Haiku is already a bit closer to this than many other systems. I think there are a few levels here, which different systems fall into:

• No code deduplication (if you run the same code in two processes it is loaded as two physical copies), e.g. on MS-DOS.
• Code is deduplicated on the file segment level but kept logically independent. E.g. via mmap(2) used for loading programs, with physical memory being shared if the same thing is loaded. Most systems do this.
• “All code is a kind of library”, meaning you can load another program into your process, and then execute (parts of) it. From my (limited) understanding this is where Haiku and 16 bit Windows is.
• “No two codes do the same”, this is what I research, and consider a goal one can only get close to, but never reach.

All of those levels come with benefits and problems. E.g. how to make sure one process cannot overwrite your memory while you’re running (e.g. memory protection flags)? How to make sure code you loaded only has access to it’s own resources (e.g. sandboxing)? How about performance? How to actually find the function you want to call? …

My point here: If you want to explore that outside a lab (like I do), on a real world. real desktop operating system, with real users, then Haiku is already a platform that comes very close.

Happy hacking everyone!

(PS: Haha, just realised my reply looks like a typical AI generated thingy. Maybe I should change my style to not be confused with AIs! At least last time I checked I was carbon based…)

[PeterW]

I once have read this on Mastodon:

Telling a programmer that a program has already been written is like telling a poet/song writer that there already is a song about love.

[SamuraiCrow]

No doubt! There are so many redundant love songs on the radio, I can barely stand to use broadcast media at all! Don’t even get me started about streaming services!

@phschafft

“All code is a kind of library”, meaning you can load another program into your process, and then execute (parts of) it. From my (limited) understanding this is where Haiku and 16 bit Windows is.

The Commodore Amiga used a superset of its pure residentable executable format to make shared libraries with the addition of a jump table to add more entry points. It’s kind of the same but with a twist!

Also, the 32-bit DLL format of Windows prior to .NET assemblies were so duplicative that it slowed the whole system to a crawl! The DRY (don’t repeat yourself) concept of the Amiga machines of the era made them so much faster with such a small memory footprint because the caches were more likely to hit rather than miss!

[suhr]

@kallisti5

LaGrange is pretty, and accomplishes this in a “retro future” kind of way. No local javascript, no tracking, no cookies, tls everywhere.

Very retro, older than Xerox Alto. In particular, things like Hexagonal Grids are no longer possible.