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> Just don't make it another UNIX, please. We have enough of those already ;) Hah thanks for the encouragement! Don't worry, there's no danger on that front. I

> Just don't make it another UNIX, please. We have enough of those already ;) Hah thanks for the encouragement! Don't worry, there's no danger on that front. I'm pretty thoroughly bored of the "everything is a file" motif. I do like unix's idea of making large programs out of small programs that can be composed together. But unix's raw byte streams make a terrible messaging bus.

sph 3y ago
You're on the right path! My area of interest is actually making messaging (a-la-Smalltalk/Erlang) the root idea everything is built upon, rather than the file stream. The file metaphor made sense in the 1960, not in an ultra-networked world of heterogeneous CPUs. IMO, communication should be the basis of computing. Which also means inventing a language to build this novel paradigm. As Dan Ingalls said, an operating system is everything that doesn't fit in a language. I am looking forward to finding the time for this long and quixotic quest :-)
- tonyg 3y ago
  You might enjoy http://synit.org/ http://synit.org/, perhaps. Heavily inspired by both Smalltalk and Erlang. (It's my own wee quixotic project btw)
  - sph 3y ago
    That looks very interesting, thanks for sharing! Somehow I had never heard of it. Time for a Show HN?
    - tonyg 3y ago
      Thanks! And good idea. The ideal time would have been early 2023, because things have drifted into bitrot a little already. I'll tidy up and see about showing it off hopefully in the next few days.
- toast0 3y ago
  Why a new language? Why not build an OS around Erlang? I present Crazierl: https://crazierl.org/ https://crazierl.org/ My crazy hobby OS vision of boot to Erlang. I've been working on this for a couple years now, recently made it public as part of a PR to v86 [1] (which is amazing, by the way). 32-bit x86, has drivers for virtio and rtl-8168 (but not ne2k, so no networking in v86, sadly), works with SMP. Probably not better than running beam as init with a FreeBSD kernel, but was more fun? [1] https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/

sph 3y ago

You're on the right path! My area of interest is actually making messaging (a-la-Smalltalk/Erlang) the root idea everything is built upon, rather than the file stream. The file metaphor made sense in the 1960, not in an ultra-networked world of heterogeneous CPUs. IMO, communication should be the basis of computing. Which also means inventing a language to build this novel paradigm. As Dan Ingalls said, an operating system is everything that doesn't fit in a language. I am looking forward to finding the time for this long and quixotic quest :-)

tonyg 3y ago
You might enjoy http://synit.org/ http://synit.org/, perhaps. Heavily inspired by both Smalltalk and Erlang. (It's my own wee quixotic project btw)
- sph 3y ago
  That looks very interesting, thanks for sharing! Somehow I had never heard of it. Time for a Show HN?
  - tonyg 3y ago
    Thanks! And good idea. The ideal time would have been early 2023, because things have drifted into bitrot a little already. I'll tidy up and see about showing it off hopefully in the next few days.
toast0 3y ago
Why a new language? Why not build an OS around Erlang? I present Crazierl: https://crazierl.org/ https://crazierl.org/ My crazy hobby OS vision of boot to Erlang. I've been working on this for a couple years now, recently made it public as part of a PR to v86 [1] (which is amazing, by the way). 32-bit x86, has drivers for virtio and rtl-8168 (but not ne2k, so no networking in v86, sadly), works with SMP. Probably not better than running beam as init with a FreeBSD kernel, but was more fun? [1] https://copy.sh/v86/ https://copy.sh/v86/