An Overview of the STING Operating System

Sting is an operating system designed to serve as a highly efficient substrate for modern programming languages. Sting includes support for: various models of parallelism and synchronization; lazy, normal, and eager evaluation; automatic storage management; and topology mapping. Sting is different from other operating systems in several respects. The basic concurrency objects in Sting, virtual processors and lightweight threads, are first class. They provide the user with a level of expressiveness and control unavailable in other operating systems. Thread scheduling and migration are completely customizable. This allows Sting to be used in real-time, interactive, and batch oriented operating environments. Sting also provides a novel system of storage management, including a new kind of parallel garbage collection. Finally, Sting introduces several new optimizations which significantly improve locality of reference and reduce storage requirements, thereby increasing efficiency.