Re: You could do worse than Mach ports

[Bill Huey (Hui) <billh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 12:48:42AM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote:
> I admit that the Mach VM primitives are fairly expensive to deal
> with, and I would avoid them too, if I could get away with it.  I
> don't think the messaging implementation is married to them, though.

The entire Mach ports system approach the complexity of an object
oriented language runtime when it is managing their port objects. So
there's a tremendous amount of overhead in that system, not to mention
their very heavy weight threading system. It's was a good kernel to
do research in, but doing a real OS in it is another matter.

Some MKs use a compiled or statically evaluated messaging/ports system
to avoid some of the runtime overhead. Can't remember one off the top
of my head, IBM ?

bill