Why do OS not support erlang's lightweight process?

[ke han]

James,
I'm pretty sure Inferno http://www.vitanuova.com/index.html have  
lightweight OS processes/threads.
It is probably possible to have a linux kernel written to support  
processes which take up much fewer resource, are quicker to allocate,  
context switch...but you would probably break so much stuff used by  
other traditional *nix apps that you would end up with a special  
purpose OS which runs nothing well except your apps meant for these  
lightweight processes.  I'm no kernel expert so I'll stop my  
speculation here ;-).
ok, I can't resist...another fantasy option would be to build up new  
alternate kernel level process/thread objects which have the  
characteristics you want and "simply" have the OS scheduler be much  
smarter to handle both heavy and lightweight processes.   But I seem  
to notice that experiments with developing "complex" schedulers  
haven't done so well.

I did study inferno two years ago when I was on my overreaching  
journey to find "better ways to build software".  This journey led me  
to study scala and erlang as well.  erlang was the only thing that  
was mature enough and could coexist well enough with existing *nix apps.
In another year, with the advent of cheap and easy to manage virtual  
OSes running on a resource aplenty $5000 server, one probably could  
much more seriously look at building apps with inferno as the app  
itself would just sit in inferno running as its own vm running  
happily alongside other *nix vms.

I think a erlang OS has been worked on by some gurus on this very  
list...perhaps they can expand on this topic?

ke han

On Aug 29, 2006, at 6:20 AM, lang er wrote:

> If OS support erlang's lightweight  process in kernel,  many  
> programming languages could have  erlang's concurrent capability.I  
> think it is not impossible.
>
> BR!
> James