Our decision to use C++ was circumscribed by the need to demonstrate an efficient object-oriented operating system. Many of the available object-oriented languages are either interpreted and slow, have considerable run-time support, or include predefined notions of fundamental parts of an operating system such as processes, synchronization, messages, and exceptions.

We have found the following attributes of significance in the design and documentation of an object-oriented operating system: data flow, entity relationships, control flow, path expressions, class hierarchies, and class interfaces [3, 4].

Since the inception of the project in 1987, we have conducted many experiments demonstrating the benefits, viability, and efficiency of an object-oriented operating system [11, 20].

* We chose to implement an object-oriented operating system to help solve the problem of porting parallel applications to a variety of different computer architectures.

Although many operating system techniques and designs are well documented, few object-oriented operating systems exist and have been described.