Abstract: | This paper describes the design, implementation, and performance of ES-Kit, a distributed object-oriented system being developed by the Experimental Systems Project at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. The operating system consists of a kernel and a set of Public Service Objects which dynamically extend the functionality of the kernel by providing several traditional operating system services when required by application objects. Applications for the ES-Kit environment are written in GNU C++ and do not require additional language primitives for distributed execution. Initial performance results from a representative set of applications indicate that the object-oriented paradigm provides a powerful solution to distributed programming. |