The impact of mesa on system design

Abstract

The Mesa programming language supports program modularity in ways that permit subsystems to be developed separately but to be bound together with complete type safety. Separate and explicit interface definitions provide an effective means of communication, both between programs and between programmers. A configuration language describes the organization of a system and controls the scopes of interfaces. These facilities have had a profound impact on the way we design systems and organize development projects. This paper reports our recent experience with Mesa, particularly its use in the development of an operating system. It illustrates techniques for designing interfaces, for using the interface language as a specification language, and for organizing a system to achieve the practical benefits of program modularity without sacrificing strict type-checking.