Operating system support for an object-oriented environment

An overview is given of the Comandos project of the European Strategic Programme for Research on Information Technology (ESPRIT). The initial phase of the project was devoted to the definition of the Comandos virtual machine and resulted from contributions of the different partners in the project. Then several testbed implementations were started to validate the basic ideas of the architecture. The virtual machine and its supporting architecture are described. Some design issues faced in the development of the prototype are presented, with particular reference to the object memory. The current status of the project and future plans are briefly discussed