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A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)
- Y_Y 10y agoHas anyone ever looked at making a more "mainstream" fork? It feels like there's a lot of cool technology in TempleOS, in amongst the less cool stuff.
- partycoder 10y agoIt would be hard since everything in TempleOS runs in ring 0, that makes it not very mainstream friendly.
- spacelizard 10y agoSomeone was working on one for a little bit, but seems to have stopped: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine https://github.com/minexew/Shrine May be a good starting point for anyone else interested.
- nistur 10y agoDespite you saying development has stopped, and there being a notice on the repository saying it had no active development, I see commits from 14 minutes ago. I wasn't aware of this, I have been tinkering with TempleOS for a while now, but I've been missing the networking functionality that Shrine provides.
- Y_Y 10y agoLast commit was half an hour ago. Apart from the notice it seems to be relatively active. They've added networking, a package manager and a unix-like shell. That's really cool. You could put it in a container and use it as an emacs alternative.
- striking 10y ago> use it as an emacs alternative. That's inspiring. I almost want to do this, just for the "nerd cred". It would be a pretty workable environment, and probably faster than emacs.
- SCHiM 10y agoEspecially HyperText/DolDoc is something that seems like a very nice feature to have. Perhaps one day someone might port something similar for Linux shells? It seems like that is what the Linux 'text only' input/output should have been. Instead of parsing ASCII which will bring about the incompatibilities that we see today, it would have been better to have all tools input/output HTML/XML and translate it into human readable text in the shell for when output is redirected to the terminal.
- nateguchi 10y agoSomething like an inline HTML & XML markup (like iXBRL[0]) would be appropriate for this - both machine and human readable, and formatted. [0] iXBRL is a markup language used for company accounts (I think it might be a requirement for submitting company accounts in the UK). Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBRL Example: http://www.xbrl.org.uk/techguidance/bbbbb-ltd.html http://www.xbrl.org.uk/techguidance/bbbbb-ltd.html
- tcbawo 10y agoA feature like that is nice, but could ultimately be abused/misusued. Sometimes is nice to have text just be plain old text. It's one of the reasons I never got into PowerShell.
- plaguuuuuu 10y agoHonestly Doldoc (at face value) is like looking into the future.
- setheron 10y agoIts a shame he hasn't hopped onto the OSS fad and taken advantage of GitHub to collect contributions. Maybe it others could this a neat project for their master/thesis?
- stirner 10y agoTerry Davis believes that God has instructed him to build a perfect temple. He takes great pride in how many different, complicated parts of the OS he has made. He is very paranoid and frequently mentions the CIA in his rants. Why would he want or need more contributors?
- mrkgnao 10y agoFrom the TempleOS homepage: > No police state. Nothing is different from 1990 except we don't have any enemies. The World has gadgets to amuse itself. Eliminate fat-ass government jobs. Eliminate CIA, NSA and TSA. Don't fucken touch my computer, CIA ------. Githib is to register and control dangerous people and code. No cloud. One needs the context. It's very stream-of-consciousness-y.
- soneca 10y agoI have the impression that this project gets so much attention because of its author's idiosyncrasy, not despite of it. Was it created by a non-racist, mentally-healthy, socially apt individual wouldn't it be regarded as a neat but not extra-ordinary hobby project? I believe it would not be so frequently a topic at HN front page. But I would like to hear others opinions on this.
- gravypod 10y agoI think you're describing Urbit. The creator is strange but not that strange in the grand scheme of things and yet Urbit still has a user base. TempleOS does some really cool things. JITed C derivative, unified terminal/texteditor/documentation, and a lot of other cool things. Just because Terry is "different" doesn't mean his work is any less valuable. More people may see it because of his "antics" but there are still cool things he has done.
- untog 10y agoAgreed. I've read more about TempleOS that pretty much any other homebrewed OS on HN. It is sort of interesting, but not as much as it is written about. And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison.
- throwaway91111 10y agoMost people don't give it justice--it's supposed to bring the C64 experience to x86-64 cores.
- coldtea 10y ago>And "it boots so much faster than Windows" type comparisons are uninspired. Of course it does, it does barely anything by comparison. Well, there are apps with thousands of users, based on Electron and NW.js, that do "barely anything" and yet load slowly as molasses and use half your CPU. What's Slack doing compared to a full (if primitive) OS and userland?
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- pcorey 10y agoFWIW, I wrote a Julia Set explorer in HolyC for TempleOS a couple years back. It was definitely an interesting experience! https://github.com/pcorey/julia-templeos https://github.com/pcorey/julia-templeos
- mempko 10y agoWow, that's tight. Really just gets to the point.
- tsheikhs 10y agoI've been dabbling in learning TempleOS programming for a bit, did a host-guest driver giving VMware Tools-like functionality, minimal web browser, Mega Man game engine & DOS demoscene style intro, Github stuff is here if anyone's interested: https://github.com/tramplersheikhs https://github.com/tramplersheikhs
- mabynogy 10y agoAmazing website too ;-) https://sheikhs.space/ https://sheikhs.space/
- ethanbas 10y agoA friend of mine made a timeline of TempleOS: https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_TempleOS https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_TempleOS
- splitbrain 10y agoInteresting. A bit off topic but I wonder what he's living off. He doesn't seem to have a regular job?
- KboPAacDA3 10y agoHe receives a disability income from the state of Nevada. I think he said about $1,500 per month.
- KboPAacDA3 10y agoI have been creating monthly archives of his website(s) and videos since 2012, hoping someone in the future will find them useful. I wonder where they can be stored online.
- br1n0 10y agoIn other words templeos is a unikernel with a jit compiler. The name is odd, the author is strange, do you judge a movie by private life of the authors? The illness of van gogh, Gödel didn't affect their creations. missing graphical interface is a defect. An unikernal is a strange beast, sound crazy, but got some advantages: is simpler, could be understood completely by a human (and not only by a genius), there are no penality for system calls, and there is no cpu time wasted on context switch. Because the machine are getting cheaper is common to have only one user, so all these security became useless, so on the long run the unikernels will be mainstream. Kudos to him. a relevant discussion about unikernel here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10362897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10362897
- laumars 10y agoThe advantage of multiple "users" isn't just blocking one person's access to another person's stuff. It's also a valuable tool for sandboxing system processes which need to run parallel on the same host system. I'm addition to that, a monolithic unikernel (as unikernels usually are) would have the issue of a higher tendency for kernel panics. So i really can't see unikernels becoming mainstream. If anything the reverse trend is true with more complex kernel designs like micro kernels becoming more favourable as computing hardware gets cheaper. The real growth area for unikernels is virtualized appliances, eg running a single purpose service as a Xen unikernel. But even that is awfully niche and often better served (particularly in terms of developer and sysadmin productivity) with containers these days.
- im_down_w_otp 10y agoI don't understand the definition of "unikernel" here. There's nothing preventing a microkernel architecture from being the basis of a unikernel. Unikernel isn't the opposite of microkernel.
- laumars 10y agoI didn't actually say a unikernel couldn't be a micro kernel though; just that there was a tendency for them to be monolithic. Unless I've overlooked a bunch of kernels - and I'm happy to be proven wrong - usually you'll find unikernels to be monolithic because those two approaches address the similar objectives in kernel design (namely simpler layout and improved performance). However correlation or not, you're probably right that my point regarding monolithic kernels wasn't entirely relevant to the rest of my post and thus just risks confusing things.
- brian-armstrong 10y agoThe argument put forth in this article is not being entirely fair. Although there are many people who are instantly dismissive of Davis, I've seen others give him a fair engagement on his ideas. They bend over backwards to give him some credibility. How does Davis respond to this? He stubbornly refuses any and all crticism, no matter how leveled it is. I've watched him go in circles for pages in forums where people modestly suggest easy improvements to his design. As always, it's a little hard to separate out the mental illness from the person. But to say people don't attempt to engage Davis fairly is flatly disingenuous, and I think the author ought to try it before making that claim.
- tmsldd 10y agoI'm not trying to rise any polemics about.. just for the sake of the debate...but is there any social skills difference to Linus? I mean, I just admire both of them.. there are very few people that can drive complex projects like Linux and templeOS.. and mental stability is something that doesn't really help much here. What I want to say is: people are like they are... we just need to love them, give them a chance to be heard.. in the end we all go back to ashes and our ideas stay flying freely... I've been running a team of about 70 people and it amazes me how different personalities create a dynamic organism... made of just tiny little imperfect pieces..
- brian-armstrong 10y agoI'm not arguing for discrediting his ideas. TempleOS is something that's novel for sure. I'm just saying that it's not fair to say that everyone's been dismissive when in fact plenty of people have tried to engage Davis about his work.
- na85 10y agoLinus has a temper but it is greatly exaggerated.
- GuiA 10y agoOn one hand he has a temper; on the other hand different cultures express disagreement/debate/etc in very different ways. The tendency for many youg americans (particularly from California) to insist that everyone use their "strong statements are bad, please make sure you don't hurt anyone's feelings" style of rhetoric and that anything else is invalid is quite frustrating. It's actually fairly present on HN, where I've seen several times people having perfectly civil (albeit curt by Silicon Valley standards) debates finding themselves chastised by the moderation team.
- macspoofing 10y ago>This combination of TempleOS's amateurish approach and Terry's unfortunate outbursts have resulted in TempleOS being often regarded as something to be mocked, ignored, or forgotten. I've only ever heard positives things said about TempleOS.
- ww520 10y agoIn some ways, TempleOS looks like an enhanced MS-DOS, where everything runs in ring 0, all tasks shares the memory space, and everything has access to all files.