Functional Programming Seminar

Speaker: Anil Madhavapeddy (Cambridge)

Title: Mirage: a multi-scale, functional operating system

Abstract: Applications run on all kinds of environments these days: multicore desktops, virtual cloud infrastructures, smart-phones, and web browsers. These diverse environments make it worth rethinking the long-term future of our software stacks; do we really want to continue bundling gigabytes of general-purpose OS software with every single cloud image? Is there any point holding onto decades-old interfaces such as POSIX any more? How do advances in programming languages fit into the way we build operating systems?

I will introduce Mirage, a new operating system built in the statically type-safe OCaml functional language. Mirage compiles high-level functional source code directly into a variety of targets: microkernels that run directly on the Xen hypervisor, Javascript for web browsers, or embedded devices and general-purpose operating systems.

Mirage provides a consistent, simple programming API across all of these diverse backends, which makes it a powerful foundation for constructing safe, complex distributed systems across a heterogeneous set of resources.