A new scheme for writing functional operating systems
William Stoye · CL Technical Reports · 2021
A scheme is described for writing nondeterministic programs in a functional language. The scheme is based on message passing between a number of expressions being evaluated in parallel. I suggest that it represents a significant improvement over previous methods employing a nondeterministic merge primitive, and overcomes numerous drawbacks in that approach. The scheme has been designed in a practical context, and is being used to write an operating system for SKIM, a functionally programmed machine. It is not yet well understood in a mathematical sense.