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Hi! I have a few questions:
1) What are the benefits of the reactive operating systems? Do you have any example use-cases that this does better than traditional approaches?
2) Do you find this related to functional reactive programming at all?
3) Since this is a model of concurrency with eventual consistency, do you see it benefitting from eventually-consistent OT or CRDT data types?
I am working on what might be a related model: https://braid.org and https://stateb.us. We are building a "distributed state abstraction", that we envision will end up in three places:
a) HTTP will upgrade from a state transfer to a state synchronization protocol
b) Applications will be separated into UIs on top of a "web of state" (see https://stateb.us/static/statebus-demo-3-31.mp4 ) and transition from web apps to app webs
c) Operating Systems will replace file systems with state systems; where local variables in memory can persist to disk without explicit read/write calls, and can be read/written across processes without programming overhead.
I am wondering if we are all looking at the same programming abstraction, but from different angles!
I'm not sure this is actually easy to solve. The basic idea here seems to be that actors coordinate with the help of shared mutable state (the "dataspace"). At this point you're actually back to square one as synchronizing shared state is the core problem with distributed, concurrent systems…
Given that, and the fact that this whole thingy is untyped makes me skeptical. Not even the std. ingredients like type-state, session types, behavioral types, or the like seem to get used. I also don't see linear types here, which go very well with session types / behavioral types, and can help making typing message passing easier.
Also that this approach would be completely network transparent, as I see it, seems like a design flaw. One needs control over the various effects that can occur! Otherwise the points form "distributed systems future work" can't be solved, imho.
And form the practical point of view: There is no Akka / Pekko based Scala implementation? I'm quite surprised, to be honest.
Akka / Pekko is the actor runtime, and Scala is famous for it's eDSL features; besides of course its type-system, which makes thing like Libretto possible, which seems related here:
https://github.com/TomasMikula/libretto
Syndicate-lang looks OTOH more like the usual callback-hell.
But like I've said, I don't get this whole thingy really. I've just clicked through some parts of the web-sites. Most likely I'm just overlooking the elephant in the room. So would be glad to learn more!
(BTW: Very nice web-site design on all the projects. Especially nice typography. Really enjoyed this part while clicking through this stuff.)