4 ms·

Writing this in C would be how much slower? Not much. Modern bloat comes from the software footprint, not so much about performance gains anymore. Compare the

by yason 16y ago

Writing this in C would be how much slower? Not much. Modern bloat comes from the software footprint, not so much about performance gains anymore. Compare the UI of MenuetOS with the latest GTK and the 100 shared libraries involved. It's not so much that C would be slow but that with C and high-level languages it's very easy to do lots of the wrong kind of work.

jasongullickson 16y ago
"Writing this in C would be how much slower? Not much." Source?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- Locke1689 16y ago
  C wouldn't be slower, it would be faster. See my other comment.
moomba 16y ago
I remember when I was taking an assembly class in college we always joked about how ridiculous it would be to write an OS in assembly. I'm surprised someone actually did it. C is so close to assembly that these seems quite unnecessary. Although I do agree with one of the developer's points that Assembly has a kind of beauty about it.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Back in the day, every OS was written in assembly. Writing Unix in C rather than assembly was actually a controversial innovation at the time.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly and then ported to C. The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths. If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html) C is good.
- tekhammer 16y ago
  As pointed out, this was normal. My favourite was RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes. The GUI OS would boot (off ROM) quicker than the CRT monitor would take to warm up. And that was 20 years ago.
- watmough 16y ago
  What about writing a dtp package in arm assembler? My first job, check out: http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm Lol. Looking at those dialogs brings it back. I probably laid most of those suckers out.
mfukar 16y ago
Let's not turn this into C vs assembly again. People are free to choose their favourite language to develop a hobbyist OS - and do a pretty good job in the process.
DrJokepu 16y ago
The point of writing software in assembly is exactly the same as writing an OS (or even a kernel): fun and self-education. I mean, they probably don't mean to take over the current mainstream x86 operating system with MenuetOS, I believe it's more about fun and learning. The same is true for writing code in assembly; it is a lot of fun (at least for me) and you learn a lot about how the underlying architecture of your chosen platform really works.
- CUViper 16y ago
  In fact this is exactly how Linux got its start -- check out Torvalds' "Just For Fun".

by yason 16y ago

jasongullickson 16y ago

"Writing this in C would be how much slower? Not much." Source?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Locke1689 16y ago
C wouldn't be slower, it would be faster. See my other comment.

moomba 16y ago

I remember when I was taking an assembly class in college we always joked about how ridiculous it would be to write an OS in assembly. I'm surprised someone actually did it. C is so close to assembly that these seems quite unnecessary. Although I do agree with one of the developer's points that Assembly has a kind of beauty about it.

philwelch 16y ago
Back in the day, every OS was written in assembly. Writing Unix in C rather than assembly was actually a controversial innovation at the time.
- mahmud 16y ago
  Unix was written in PDP-7 assembly and then ported to C. The porting to C also cemented C's winning of the systems programming race, and fully liberated systems programmers from the underlying machine. C made the machine-word obselete by standardizing on a few types with relative widths. If that wasn't the case, something like BLISS would have caught on, and BLISS didn't look the same on different platforms; its data types mapped 1:1 to underlying machine words and you had to deal with explicit alignment, allocation, and linkage. Explicit addressing modes and explicit heap and stack allocation modes. IOW, a royal pain in the butt, even though bliss was expression-based and well thought out (read all about Olin Shivers' praises for Bliss, though personally I don't see why: http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html) C is good.
tekhammer 16y ago
As pointed out, this was normal. My favourite was RiscOS on the Acorn Archimedes. The GUI OS would boot (off ROM) quicker than the CRT monitor would take to warm up. And that was 20 years ago.
watmough 16y ago
What about writing a dtp package in arm assembler? My first job, check out: http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm http://www.cconcepts.co.uk/products/publish.htm Lol. Looking at those dialogs brings it back. I probably laid most of those suckers out.

mfukar 16y ago

Let's not turn this into C vs assembly again. People are free to choose their favourite language to develop a hobbyist OS - and do a pretty good job in the process.

DrJokepu 16y ago

The point of writing software in assembly is exactly the same as writing an OS (or even a kernel): fun and self-education. I mean, they probably don't mean to take over the current mainstream x86 operating system with MenuetOS, I believe it's more about fun and learning. The same is true for writing code in assembly; it is a lot of fun (at least for me) and you learn a lot about how the underlying architecture of your chosen platform really works.

CUViper 16y ago
In fact this is exactly how Linux got its start -- check out Torvalds' "Just For Fun".