from Hacker News

Phantom – forward-thinking concept of OS that's not Linux-derived

by shalabhc on 10/21/19, 11:56 AM with 50 comments

  • by theamk on 10/22/19, 3:06 AM

    This is very interesting, but I have a lot of questions about how "keeping documents as in-memory object" works in practice -- because files gives us lots of features we depend on, without even realizing it.

    - Upgrade software: right now, my "txt" files are independent from "/usr/bin/emacs". I can upgrade emacs to the later version, and use it to re-open the same documents. This does not seem possible if by file is "text window + object pointer + editor code".

    - Move/copy files between machines -- I can copy most of the files, but not objects. I can also save older versions, send them by email or messengers, and so on.

    - Recover from bad software -- the other day, my computer decided it wants to have a full-screen uncloseable window. A reboot fixed this right up. Good thing it was not persistent.

    - Recover from crashes. What do you do if you write a presentation, and a programming error causes program to stop responding if you ever draw a green circle of certain size? In regular OS, you restart your software, load the latest savefile, and avoid green circles in the future. In PhantomOS, looks like you will be screwed.

    The only thing that Phantom seems to offer is snapshots, but they are pretty extreme (the whole system is reverted), and even then, it only helps with some classes of bugs, the ones which are obvious enough that you notice them right away.

  • by MisterTea on 10/21/19, 9:27 PM

    I immediatly started singing the Spam song in my head but replaced Spam with State. Lovely State! Wonderful State!

    I actually prefer the old days: turn the thing off and walk away. Screw state.

  • by lioeters on 10/21/19, 4:37 PM

  • by dzavalishin on 10/22/19, 1:40 PM

    Hi everybody. As the author of original Phantom OS idea I'd like to thank you for the discussion.

    I am here to answer any question, please ask.

    If you have some collaboration or experiment with Phantom in mind, I'll be happy to discuss. I'm looking for practical but simple use case for Phantom OS.

  • by qwerty456127 on 10/22/19, 12:00 AM

    > Your program will survive OS reboot. All variables are now.. like files?

    Sounds like we will have to format the hard drive and re-install everything every week or even more often.

  • by pjmlp on 10/21/19, 9:58 PM

    Some ideas seem similar to Taos:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607

  • by droobles on 10/21/19, 9:21 PM

    A nitpick, in your FAQ's it should be "in the 1960's" not "the 1960th" if I'm reading the year correctly.

  • by ocdtrekkie on 10/21/19, 9:11 PM

    Probably the thing that concerns me the most here: If it is as described... turning it off and then back on again probably won't fix whatever it's doing wrong. :/

    I'm very curious what troubleshooting a system like this would look like.

  • by Angeo34 on 10/21/19, 5:40 PM

    >that's not Linux derived I get that it's supposed to be a strength but it will also be the reason it will be absolutely useless. Even BSDs implemented the Linux glue because everything is made for Linux.

  • by gumby on 10/22/19, 2:27 AM

    I'm intrigued by the comments suggesting that rebooting a machine is a good way to fix problems. I certainly know that it can work but really it's a regrettable last resort to solve a problem.

    It would be good to have an OS that brings back the idea of persistent state. Plenty of programs have to run without stopping so require thinking of long term behavior (power plants, various spacecraft, medical implants, etc). People without stopping and in fact halting them is greatly discouraged.

  • by 0xdead on 10/22/19, 11:10 AM

    A "forward-thinking" project shouldn't have been written in C. They should've used Rust.