5 ms·

I can't stop asking myself ... "BUT WHY?!". I'm sorry for being sarcastic, but what could be the benefit of using such an OS?

jokoon 12y ago
you can put wings on a motorbike, attach a boat hull on a train, grow a tree in a boat, build a house upside down, have a toilet made of gold, create a ski track in a hot country... It's useless, expensive, doesn't make sense, doesn't improve technologies, but you can show it to the world, and it will be talked about. The benefit might be to teach people about using compiler technologies: front end, back end, optimizers, parsers etc, so that they might create some new, useful, well designed language. My beef with hackers is that they sometime totally lack insight and design goal. That's cool to have access to technology and tinkering, but if you don't explore any new way of doing things, it's a little sad.
- sehr 12y ago
  > My beef with hackers is that they sometime totally lack insight and design goal. > ... but if you don't explore any new way of doing things, it's a little sad. Self involved pretentiousness aside, what are your standards for an insightful, well designed, new hack? And if a 'hack' doesn't meet these standards, is it worthless to pursue? Should we give up on any curious adventures for fear they might not be insightful enough?
thegeomaster 12y ago
Actually, I think there's a pretty good motivation behind this. When executing JS code in a browser, it runs inside a safe VM and can't touch any of the memory or variables that don't belong to it. However, the browser itself has to go through a lot of the abstractions and safeguards required by the kernel in order to run. Particularly, every syscall induces a context switch which costs a lot of CPU cycles. This happens on every operations that needs access to hardware, such as reading from a file or from a socket for IPC. Also, the kernel needs to update the MMU registers so it can map its own address space, invalidate the whole TLB, etc etc etc. The basic idea here, it seems, is to avoid all these costs and build the system so the user can run nothing that isn't a VM. The VM will provide fail-safes and terminate offending code. This allows everything to run in a single address space and under ring 0, thus avoiding context switching. This is beneficial to (and only to) code that we used to run under a browser or some kind of JS virtual machine (Node.JS servers come to my mind here). Web apps such as editors (Atom maybe?) or any other kind can now run natively and run way faster, which is very important on low-cost low-end machines, without all the overhead that they know pay twice (first to virtualize JS from everything else, and then to virtualize the browser processes). However, the raw performance that can be gained from writing fast C/C++ code will essentially be lost. The more JS code you were running before, the more a naked metal JavaScript OS will benefit you. It's not clear to me if this will ever be necessary. What I just said is the justification of the idea, just from the top of my mind. Anyone feel free to correct me if I screwed up the argument :)
- serge2k 12y ago
  It's a cool idea, why implement it in a shitty language?
  - thegeomaster 12y ago
    Because, sadly, everyone is hopping on the JavaScript bandwagon. But it's not as bad as it seems. There is CoffeeScript which is IMHO a considerably better language, and there is ClojureScript which brings the wonders of Lisps into JS. And for simple webapp logic I can tolerate JavaScript. It's also an uncomfortable but true fact that JavaScript is today one of the most-used languages in the realm of forward-driving forces of tech (that would be the startups). Most GitHub repos are in JS, too. However, the lack of integers will always be my pet peeve, and I really can't imagine how could someone arrive at such a horrible idea.
    - TheZenPsycho 12y ago
      but coffeescript IS exactly javascript with a bad syntax translator. It' not a "considerably better language" it's the same language.
    - fetbaffe 12y ago
      Depending on your use case, you can use Int32Array https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Int32Array https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Int32Array
    - LunaSea 12y ago
      CoffeeScript is just an unreadable JavaScript version with additional bugs and a smaller community.
  - fetbaffe 12y ago
    Because almost all the other shitty languages already have projects like this.
- lallysingh 12y ago
  OK, so this is to generate, essentially VM images to run in a hypervisor? And is useful if you've got something like a node.js app that you want to run? I can see that. I don't see the argument for "security, reliability and performance." First for oxford-comma reasons, next in terms of comparison with a kernel written in other languages, and finally in terms of JS. But if you have to use JS, and you want to run something like a serving appliance VM, I can see how this could make things faster. Although calling in and out of native code should be quite fast on a JS engine, and using existing drivers and network stacks written in native code should be substantially faster, more reliable, and more stable than rewriting them in JS.
sebastianconcpt 12y ago
A dynamic foundation

jokoon 12y ago

you can put wings on a motorbike, attach a boat hull on a train, grow a tree in a boat, build a house upside down, have a toilet made of gold, create a ski track in a hot country... It's useless, expensive, doesn't make sense, doesn't improve technologies, but you can show it to the world, and it will be talked about. The benefit might be to teach people about using compiler technologies: front end, back end, optimizers, parsers etc, so that they might create some new, useful, well designed language. My beef with hackers is that they sometime totally lack insight and design goal. That's cool to have access to technology and tinkering, but if you don't explore any new way of doing things, it's a little sad.

sehr 12y ago
> My beef with hackers is that they sometime totally lack insight and design goal. > ... but if you don't explore any new way of doing things, it's a little sad. Self involved pretentiousness aside, what are your standards for an insightful, well designed, new hack? And if a 'hack' doesn't meet these standards, is it worthless to pursue? Should we give up on any curious adventures for fear they might not be insightful enough?

thegeomaster 12y ago

Actually, I think there's a pretty good motivation behind this. When executing JS code in a browser, it runs inside a safe VM and can't touch any of the memory or variables that don't belong to it. However, the browser itself has to go through a lot of the abstractions and safeguards required by the kernel in order to run. Particularly, every syscall induces a context switch which costs a lot of CPU cycles. This happens on every operations that needs access to hardware, such as reading from a file or from a socket for IPC. Also, the kernel needs to update the MMU registers so it can map its own address space, invalidate the whole TLB, etc etc etc. The basic idea here, it seems, is to avoid all these costs and build the system so the user can run nothing that isn't a VM. The VM will provide fail-safes and terminate offending code. This allows everything to run in a single address space and under ring 0, thus avoiding context switching. This is beneficial to (and only to) code that we used to run under a browser or some kind of JS virtual machine (Node.JS servers come to my mind here). Web apps such as editors (Atom maybe?) or any other kind can now run natively and run way faster, which is very important on low-cost low-end machines, without all the overhead that they know pay twice (first to virtualize JS from everything else, and then to virtualize the browser processes). However, the raw performance that can be gained from writing fast C/C++ code will essentially be lost. The more JS code you were running before, the more a naked metal JavaScript OS will benefit you. It's not clear to me if this will ever be necessary. What I just said is the justification of the idea, just from the top of my mind. Anyone feel free to correct me if I screwed up the argument :)

serge2k 12y ago
It's a cool idea, why implement it in a shitty language?
- thegeomaster 12y ago
  Because, sadly, everyone is hopping on the JavaScript bandwagon. But it's not as bad as it seems. There is CoffeeScript which is IMHO a considerably better language, and there is ClojureScript which brings the wonders of Lisps into JS. And for simple webapp logic I can tolerate JavaScript. It's also an uncomfortable but true fact that JavaScript is today one of the most-used languages in the realm of forward-driving forces of tech (that would be the startups). Most GitHub repos are in JS, too. However, the lack of integers will always be my pet peeve, and I really can't imagine how could someone arrive at such a horrible idea.
  - TheZenPsycho 12y ago
    but coffeescript IS exactly javascript with a bad syntax translator. It' not a "considerably better language" it's the same language.
  - fetbaffe 12y ago
    Depending on your use case, you can use Int32Array https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Int32Array https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Int32Array
  - LunaSea 12y ago
    CoffeeScript is just an unreadable JavaScript version with additional bugs and a smaller community.
- fetbaffe 12y ago
  Because almost all the other shitty languages already have projects like this.
lallysingh 12y ago
OK, so this is to generate, essentially VM images to run in a hypervisor? And is useful if you've got something like a node.js app that you want to run? I can see that. I don't see the argument for "security, reliability and performance." First for oxford-comma reasons, next in terms of comparison with a kernel written in other languages, and finally in terms of JS. But if you have to use JS, and you want to run something like a serving appliance VM, I can see how this could make things faster. Although calling in and out of native code should be quite fast on a JS engine, and using existing drivers and network stacks written in native code should be substantially faster, more reliable, and more stable than rewriting them in JS.

sebastianconcpt 12y ago

A dynamic foundation