Send: Objects, History, and Transactions in a Single-Verb Kernel
Christopher Goes

TL;DR
This paper introduces a minimal kernel design that unifies multiple structural properties for multi-party object coordination, ensuring robustness and security through a uniform interface and primitive object distinctions.
Contribution
It presents a novel kernel architecture built from s-expressions and a single 'send' interface that jointly enforces six key properties in multi-party systems.
Findings
Kernel guarantees all six properties under kernel-faithful trust.
Append-only logs enable immutability and replay.
Cryptographic compiler can secure operator-adversarial deployments.
Abstract
Multi-party object coordination - across object-capability systems, smart-contract platforms, distributed actors, and event-sourced architectures - is shaped by six structural properties: authenticated provenance, opaque encapsulation, atomic multi-object commit, deterministic replay, immutable history, and history-derived state. Existing systems compose subsets via separate layered mechanisms (RPC, capability ACLs, transaction coordinators, event journals, vat boundaries); each layer is well-studied but the combination is fragile. We present a minimal kernel which makes them jointly compatible. Our kernel is built from s-expressions, a uniform 'send' interface, transactions, and one primitive object distinction: *ephemeral* (caller's context inherited) vs. *persistent* (context switches to the target's kernel-assigned identity and append-only log). The kernel structurally classifies…
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