Christopher Goes' 'Send' kernel unifies objects, history, and transactions in one verb

In a new arXiv preprint, researcher Christopher Goes introduces 'Send,' a minimal kernel designed to unify six essential structural properties for multi-party object coordination: authenticated provenance, opaque encapsulation, atomic multi-object commit, deterministic replay, immutable history, and history-derived state. Existing systems combine these via separate layers like RPC, capability ACLs, and transaction coordinators—a fragile composition. Goes' kernel instead builds from s-expressions, a uniform 'send' interface, transactions, and a single primitive object distinction: ephemeral (inherits caller context) vs. persistent (switches to the target's kernel-assigned identity and append-only log). The kernel structurally classifies every send target into six cases without any input from the caller, making the dispatch uniform and intensional.

Under kernel-faithful trust—where the kernel runs its semantics as specified—the design holds all six properties as kernel-level guarantees, meaning the transition function refuses states that violate them. Even against an unconstrained operator, five of the six properties survive; opacity against the operator additionally requires operator-faithful trust (the operator accesses logs only via 'recall' and does not censor or reorder transactions). Append-only logs underpin immutability, replay, and history-derived state, while kernel-controlled persistent dispatch yields authenticated provenance and opacity. The paper suggests that operator-adversarial deployments can be realized with a cryptographic compiler. This approach offers a radically simpler foundation for distributed systems, smart contracts, and event-sourced architectures.