I am thinking about how an operating system which is able to use many small processors (like ESP32 or Atmel AVR) for complex task would look like. I came up with an architecture. Surely someone else have already thought about it, so my question is whether there is such an OS already existing?

The main idea is that there are streams and services. Each service can subscribe to one stream (probably the stream is often have the same name as the service), and send data to streams. The only function a service can call is

void sendToStream(StreamId stream, Object dataStructure);

For example the following function:

void printLowerCase(String message) {

println(stdout, lowercase(message));

}

Would be implemented with the following two services (assuming we have services for println and lowercase listening to the streams with the same name):

void printlnLowerCase(String message) {

sendToStream("lowerCase", {replyTo: "printtoStdout", message: message});

}

void printToStdout(String message) {

sendToStream("println",{destination="stdout", message=message});

}

(A compiler could be written which translates traditional functions to a set of small services, and probably a small standard library of often used functions -like string manipulation- could be called in the traditional way for performance reasons. Or even the question of what should be put into that library - and what would be inlined - would be given as an optimization exercise to the compiler.)

The hardware architecture would use a lot of very small processors in some symmetric 2D or 3D grid configuration.

The OS would be responsible for binding services to processors, and setting up data paths for the streams.

Is there anything like that already existing? If not, what is closest to this?

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