Language-based Operating Systems Work

• Fox (Carnegie Mellon University) Group Members
  The objective of the Fox Project is to advance the art of programming-language design and implementation, and simultaneously to apply principles of programming languages to advance the art of systems building. The starting point for the work on language design and implementation is the Standard ML programming language.
• Inferno
  Inferno(tm) is a new network operating system and programming environment to deliver content in a rich environment of heterogenous networks, clients and servers. The Inferno system includes the Inferno kernel, the Limbo(tm) programming language, reference APIs that include interfaces for networking and graphics, network protocols, security and authentication, and various toolkits. Inferno was developed by members of the Computing Sciences Research Center of Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies.
• Merlin (University of Sao Paulo)
  An object-oriented, reflective operating system based on the Self programming language
• Oberon
  Oberon is a freely distributable OS written in the Oberon language in the Pascal-Modula tradition, developed by Niklaus Wirth and Juerg Gutknecht at the Institute for Computer Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). The most recent development of it is called Oberon System 3. It is available as Native Oberon for Intel-based machines which is self-contained and makes no use of any alien software layer. In addition, ports exist for all flavors of Windows: 3.1, 3.11, 95 and NT, as well as for Linux and for Macintosh.
• SPIN (University of Washington) Group Members
  SPIN is one of several research systems that aims toward run-time flexibility and specialization using techniques like type-safe languages and dynamic code generation to make a fast, dynamic, flexible system. It is an extensible operating system micro-kernel that supports the dynamic adaptation of system interfaces and implementations through direct application control, while still maintaining system integrity and inter-application isolation.
• Sting
  Sting is an experimental operating system designed to serve as an efficient customizable substrate for modern programming languages. The base language used in our current implementation is Scheme, but Sting's core ideas could be incorporated into any reasonably high-level language. The ultimate goal in this project is to build a unified programming environment for parallel and distributed computing.
• TUNES Group Members
  Tunes is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethough Computing System, based on a correctness-proof-secure higher-order reflective self-extensible fine-grained distributed persistent fault-tolerant version-aware decentralized (no-kernel) object system. We want to implement such a system because we know all these are required for the computing industry to compete fairly, which is not currently possible. Even if Tunes itself does not become a world-wide OS, we hope the TUNES experience can speed up the appearance of such an OS that would fulfill our requirements.