[Self-interest] globals (was: Block Question)

[Steve Dekorte]

> On Nov 12, 2021, at 6:08 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> 
> The problem is that this makes old MS-DOS look like a security focused
> operating system in comparison. But what if the VM could handle multiple
> images which communicated with each other? Supposing only a single
> "system image" had access to the SqueakNOS primitives while the various
> "application images" ran the user's code this could be a very secure OS.
> In fact, the various images wouldn't even have to be the same version.
> Craig Latta has worked in this area:
> 
> https://github.com/ccrraaiigg/context

Cool project! I like the model of an actor/process having complete internal read/write access to itself (by having its own image) with only fast message sending access to other actor/processes it’s been given a reference to. In the 80s or 90s, memory constraints may have made each subsystem having its own image impractical, but we have 1000x more RAM now. Also, using shared references to read-only base image or shared content addressable memory (eg methods stored by hash), could keep it tight. This model might help address some of the security issues that packaging systems (eg npm) are running into.

Steve