mu VS mirage

Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.

This was the thinking behind my https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Yes thank you, I was indeed alluding to https://github.com/akkartik/mu. Perhaps a more precise term would be "software stack".

I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc."

There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).

"Separation of concerns is a hard-won insight."

Absolutely. I'm arguing for separating just concerns, without entangling them with considerations of people.

It's certainly reasonable to consider my projects toy. I consider them research:

* https://github.com/akkartik/mu

* https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"The idea that projects should take source copies instead of library dependencies is just kind of nuts..."

The idea that projects should take copies seems about symmetric to me with taking pointers. Call by value vs call by reference. We just haven't had 50 years of tooling to support copies. Where would we be by now if we had devoted equal resources to both branches?

"...at least for large libraries."

How are these large libraries going for ya? Log4j wasn't exactly a shining example of the human race at its best. We're trying to run before we can walk.

I still believe :) I'm looking not for an economic argument but for a strategic one. I think[1] a self-hosted setup with minimal dependencies can be more resilient than a conventional one, whether with a vendor or self-hosted.

https://sandstorm.io got a lot right. I wish they'd paid more attention to upgrade burdens.

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving up. What sort of network card do you support?

Interesting, and thanks.

I didn't know about those. I kind of thought you may have used MirageOS, which I had read about earlier. It is done in OCaml.

https://mirage.io/

Unix system programming in OCaml (2014)

https://ocaml.github.io/ocamlunix/

"MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels for secure, high-performance network applications across a variety of cloud computing and mobile platforms."

https://mirage.io/

That was/is part of the promise of the whole unikernel thing, no?

https://mirage.io/ or similar could then let you boot your database. That said, it's not really taken off from what I can tell, so I'm guessing there's more to it than that.

MirageOS is not Rust, but in the ballpark!

https://mirage.io/

OCaml MirageOS? https://mirage.io/

MirageOS is a runtime for OCaml to create unikernels. They describe themselves as "library operating system". Probably not quite what you were asking for, but I think it's quite interesting for certain use cases (e.g. running services as standalone unikernels in VMs or embedded devices instead of "traditional" programs on top of a general purpose OS).