Reply To: Memory

I read papers and documentation on KeyKos and Coyotos. Although that was a few years ago.
And separate address spaces offer most of the advantages of capabilites without being C-incompatible. The traditional problem for separate address spaces is expensive context switches. But on multicore 64 bit processors context switches can be vastly reduced, and the Mill goes into that direction anyway. And with the cache architecture of the Mill and below cache TLBs context switches can become a lot cheaper too even with separate address spaces.
And as you said yourself, it’s better to leave the OS out of as much things as possible and let the hardware take care of things, and capabilities must be OS constructs and cannot be hardware data types like virtual addresses can. Or am I wrong here?

And yes, language design is a terrible vice. Ever since I started programming I was unhappy and annoyed and frustrated with whatever I was using. And whenever you try to find or to think of ways to do things better, what you find and learn usually only reveals new annoyances that make you quickly forget about the old ones you have solved.