OS Review Vol 39, Number 2

Today I received Operating Systems review Vol39, No2. I took off the plastic wrapper, and one title that caught my attention was "My recollections of OS design" by E.W. Dijkstra in the cover page. I opened a random page in the booklet, and I was surprised by the pages and pages of handwriting included. One expects articles with the usual abstract, introduction, conclusion etc. you know. It always has been so. But this one is like an essay by a high-school student. Of course it was this article I mentioned, by Dijkstra. If I had contributed so many things to computer science as him, I would have also published such a stylish article on ACM OS Review.

But anyways, this just reminded me that I really need to read the CSP book by Tony Hoare. I know about locks semaphores etc. but I still don't have a mathematical background on concurrency and its time to learn it from experts. Also I remember that about Tony Hoare's work, my supervisor said to me one day - well here's what he said, I quote it from an email: "Interestingly I went to the conference dinner last night of a two-day event to honour Prof Tony Hoare and the 25 year history of his CSP theory, and its use in the development of the occam language and the transputer. This was an attempt (probably 25 years ahead of its time) to put embedded systems onto a scientific basis. There is a bit of me that believes that there is hope that some of this work will be taken up again, but what I mostly see is embedded people making exactly the same mistakes that the mainstream computer folks made decades before, and not learning from the experience of others."

So, I should learn from the experience of others, and to do that, first understand the CSP. I'm sure there's a lot to adopt from it for a microkernel project such as L4.