3 ms·
Seeing the headline, one could be scared away thinking this is bare metal from scratch. It is not. The app is an X11 client and will run under an OS, meaning y
by jagged-chisel 3y ago
Seeing the headline, one could be scared away thinking this is bare metal from scratch. It is not.
The app is an X11 client and will run under an OS, meaning you’ll learn to make system calls and other library calls to get things on the screen. Very educational, and not scary-deep.
- tengwar2 3y agoIt's also not that hard to write a simple real bare-metal GUI in assembler. I had to built some lab apparatus under OS/2 1.0, which didn't have a GUI, and most of it was in assembler. It's a while back, but from memory, the main bits I needed were lines and circle segments (using Bresenham's algorithm); mouse pointer draw/refresh; writing text (I copied bitmaps for VGA text from MS/DOS); menus; text entry; and mouse drag as a way of selecting an area or marking a circle. Apart from the mouse pointer, it was single-threaded and pretty simplistic, but good enough to be in use for several years. It had to be: it wasn't easy to move to OS/2 1.1 and get the Presentation Manage GUI because they changed the memory model and for performance reasons some of the bit-bashing I needed for a non-GUI part of the system was done with a large amount of wire-wrap. Anyway, the bare-metal GUI bit was really pretty simple to implement.