Writing systems software in a functional language: An experience report Export

@inproceedings{Diatchki:2008:House, abstract = {Current practices for developing systems software usually rely on fairly low-level programming languages and tools. As an alternative, our group has been investigating the possibility of using a high-level functional language, Haskell, for kernel and device driver construction, with the hope that it will allow us to produce more reliable and secure software. In this paper, we describe our experience developing a prototype operating system, House, in which the kernel, device drivers, and even a simple GUI, are all written in Haskell. The House system demonstrates that it is indeed possible to construct systems software in a functional language. However, it also suggests some ideas for a new Haskell dialect with features that target specific needs in this domain, including strongly typed support for low-level data structures and facilities for explicit memory accounting.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Diatchki, Iavor S. and Hallgren, Thomas and Jones, Mark P. and Leslie, Rebekah and Tolmach, Andrew}, booktitle = {PLOS '07: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems}, citeulike-article-id = {4920595}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1376789.1376791}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1376789.1376791}, doi = {10.1145/1376789.1376791}, isbn = {978-1-59593-922-7}, keywords = {haskell, operating-systems}, location = {Stevenson, Washington}, pages = {1--5}, posted-at = {2009-06-22 00:11:24}, priority = {2}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Writing systems software in a functional language: {An} experience report}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1376789.1376791}, year = {2007} }

TY - CONF ID - Diatchki:2008:House L3 - citeulike-article-id:4920595 N2 - Current practices for developing systems software usually rely on fairly low-level programming languages and tools. As an alternative, our group has been investigating the possibility of using a high-level functional language, Haskell, for kernel and device driver construction, with the hope that it will allow us to produce more reliable and secure software. In this paper, we describe our experience developing a prototype operating system, House, in which the kernel, device drivers, and even a simple GUI, are all written in Haskell. The House system demonstrates that it is indeed possible to construct systems software in a functional language. However, it also suggests some ideas for a new Haskell dialect with features that target specific needs in this domain, including strongly typed support for low-level data structures and facilities for explicit memory accounting. CY - Stevenson, Washington SN - 978-1-59593-922-7 AD - New York, NY, USA EP - 5 TI - Writing systems software in a functional language: {An} experience report PB - ACM T2 - PLOS '07: Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems SP - 1 KW - haskell KW - operating-systems AU - Diatchki, Iavor AU - Hallgren, Thomas AU - Jones, Mark AU - Leslie, Rebekah AU - Tolmach, Andrew PY - 2007/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1376789.1376791 ER -