Croquet project solves the Boundary paradox and the Compatibility paradox: it is "a framework for delivering a scalable, persistent, and extensible interface to network delivered resources." The mission is not backwards-compatible:
What if we were to create a new operating system and user interface knowing what we know today, how far could we go? What kinds of decisions would we make that we might have been unable to even consider 20 or 30 years ago, when the current set of operating systems were first created?The architecture relies on truly mobile code:
More traditional distributed systems replicate data, but try very hard not to replicate computation. But, it is often easier and more efficient to send the computation to the data, rather than the other way round.Croquet is great research. The system makes full use of its foundation, Squeak, an implementation of SmallTalk. Today Squeak is a niche technology—will Croquet manage to bring it into the mainstream and make a big impact?