It's good to see some folks on HN who have an interest in Singularity-like concepts. It makes me want to take this opportunity to ask if anybody has noticed the similarities between those projects and things going on over in the LLVM world.

To my eyes, LLVM brings many of the same things to the table as the Bartok compiler, which also uses an SSA IR to provide the safety needed to run everything in ring 0.

Furthermore, if one reads the pubs directory over at llvm.org, one sees research papers where a few instructions were added (LLVA) that give LLVM the ability to host a modified version of linux where everything is managed within LLVM, save a very tiny shim between LLVM and the hardware.

There's also some papers on LLVM-SVA (Secure Virtual Architecture) where the same concept is extended to "enforce fine-grained (object level) memory safety, control-flow integrity, type safety..."

So to my amateur eyes, it looks like these research projects are very similar, with one being less overt about the direction it's headed.

Am I high? Has anybody else noticed this?