The Workshop on Self-sustaining Systems (S3) is a forum for the discussion of topics relating to computer systems and languages that are able to bootstrap, implement, modify, and maintain themselves. One property of these systems is that their implementation is based on small but powerful abstractions; examples include (amongst others) Squeak/Smalltalk, COLA, Klein/Self, PyPy/Python, Rubinius/Ruby, and Lisp. Such systems are the engines of their own replacement, giving researchers and developers great power to experiment with, and explore future directions from within, their own small language kernels.
S3 took place on May 15-16, 2008 at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, Germany. It was an exciting opportunity for researchers and practitioners interested in self-sustaining systems to meet and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development. S3 provided an opportunity for a community to gather and discuss the need for self-sustainability in software systems, and to share and explore thoughts on why such systems are needed and how they can be created and deployed. Analogies were made, for example, with evolutionary cycles, and with urban design and the subsequent inevitable socially-driven change...