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I keep wondering if it's time for a Gopen BSD or a Rust in BSDeace or some equally terrible name that means re-writing the OS except for the fiddly assembler bi
by technofiend 11y ago
I keep wondering if it's time for a Gopen BSD or a Rust in BSDeace or some equally terrible name that means re-writing the OS except for the fiddly assembler bits in a safer language.
Where are Vernor Vinge's Focused programmers when you really need to outsource something?
- vezzy-fnord 11y agolsub is currently working on a Plan 9-ish OS in Go called Clive, though still as a research system: http://lsub.org/ls/clive.html http://lsub.org/ls/clive.html
- technofiend 11y agoOh man Plan 9 broke my heart once already when they didn't become the Next Big Thing. I was digging their take on namespaces after seeing something similar for filesystems on Apollo's UNIX. I would love to "break glass" (I.e. temporarily gain privileged access) to a remote system's namepace and dtrace/systemtap running processeses without ever leaving my desktop.
- SwellJoe 11y agoThere's Redox, which was just discussed on HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10295187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10295187 There are also a couple of projects re-implementing the standard UNIX utilities in Rust and Go. I suspect that, like Linux couldn't have exploded in popularity without an existing and excellent suite of utility programs, it's unlikely a new OS could take off without the same existing for it. Though, implementing a UNIX-like/POSIX-compatible kernel might be a reasonable starting point. So far, however, the folks working on operating systems in Rust and Go are wanting to implement actually new operating systems, not merely reimplement UNIX in those languages. Which is to say, maybe an impossible goal, I dunno. No other kind of "make a better OS" project has actually succeeded without massive financial backing, and there have been many.