[gold-devel] New ideas for Gold

[Justin Hibbits]

It's that time again, folks -- time to redesign Gold yet again.  This time, I'm
trying to solidify goals for it, and let the design fit the goals, instead of
the goals fitting the design.  First, my ideas for the new design --

	- Take FreeBSD -CURRENT, and make it the base for Gold.  This would give us
	a platform to work with that's both high performant and standardized, so
	stable.
	- Move libSystem to be a library on top of FreeBSD's system core (libc,
	  		libthr, libm, etc).
	- Include Apple's AutoZone, the automatic garbage collector library, Apache
	licensed, which makes it awesomely usable.
	- Basically, make Gold a "better Darwin" -- a complete system from the core
	all the way up, focusing on high performance, usability, and flexibility.

Now, the goals:

	- High performance -- Saying it's a "better Darwin" means I want it to not
	hit the same pitfalls -- fork() cannot take half a lifetime.
	- Usability -- OS X made a lot of really good changes for usability, that I
	think should be incorporated, but those should be guidelines, not hard
	rules.
	- Saying that, Flexibility is final -- OS X is usable, but it's not at all
	flexible.  KDE is flexible and usable, GNOME is usable and inflexible,
	Windowmaker is flexible but not too usable for the populus.
	- Use the right tool for the job.  I like Objective-C, but it's not the
	perfect solution to everything.  Python makes sense a lot of the time, even
	C++ is necessary sometimes.  I've gotten so caught up with the Objective-C
	bandwagon, that I've been blind to the features of C++ that are quite nice.

Questions, comments, snide remarks?

- Justin