liballocs

Library by stephenrkell (owner), jryans (contributor) (2011 – present)

Meta-level run-time services for Unix processes… a.k.a. dragging Unix into the 1980s

Unix abstractions are fairly simple and fairly general, but they are not humane, and they invite fragmentation. By ‘not humane’, I mean that they are error-prone and difficult to experiment with interactively. By ‘fragmentation’, I mean they invite building higher-level abstractions in mutually opaque and incompatible ways (think language VMs, file formats, middlewares…). To avoid these, liballocs is a minimal extension of Unix-like abstractions broadly in the spirit of Smalltalk-style dynamism, designed to counter both of these problems.

Metadata

  • suggesters: jryans
  • curators: jryans