MASPLAS '98

1998 Mid-Atlantic Student Workshop on Programming Languages and Systems

in cooperation with ACM SIGPLAN

April 4, 1998 Rutgers The State University, NJ

Portable Distributed Systems

by Dennis Ritchie, Bell Labs

Today's operating system and language technology makes it possible to produce computer software systems that are portable over a broad range of platforms and environments. This talk reviews the techniques that have been used by our group to produce such systems.

The two areas that are most important are coherent, simple ways of naming and accessing distributed resources, and language technology that promotes program portability. The presentation discusses the Bell Labs work on Plan 9 and Inferno as well as looking at other approaches.

Our recent work used a newly developed language, Limbo, that uses implementation techiques similar to those of Java. but more thoroughly integrated into a virtual operating system as well as a virtual machine. The talk will mention the main features of Limbo and some of the experiences with it.

Biography of Dennis Ritchie

Dennis M. Ritchie is head of the System Software Research Department of Bell Laboratories, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1968 after obtaining his graduate and undergraduate degrees from Harvard University. He assisted Ken Thompson in creating the Unix operating system, and is the primary designer of the C language, in which Unix, as well as many other systems, are written. He continues to work in operating systems and languages.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, is a Bell Laboratories Fellow, and has received several honors, including the ACM Turing award, the IEEE Piore, Hamming and Pioneer awards, and the NEC C&C Foundation award.

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