NAnateb2022·Jul 24, 2023Submission
Zen: Experimental operating system written in Zig
2 points · Open discussionAndreaOrru
zen
Zig2018–2023
AndreaOrru / zen
zen
Experimental operating system written in Zig
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
537GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Experimental operating system written in Zig
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- andrewrk/clashos · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-01-18 23:06:00 UTC to 2023-07-24 17:21:06 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesWritten in Zig.
https://boksos.com/
https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21967668
In The wild world of non-C operating systemsHere is a microkernel written in Zig: https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen
In Hobby x86 kernel written with ZigZig was started with that exact use case at the forefront of its design.
- Zig has no hard dependency on libc, it's the user's choice whether he wants to link it or not. It ships musl libc and can build/link it for most (all?) supported targets.
- Most of Zig's standard library works on freestanding targets. No runtime needed. There are no implicit allocators, so the user must use an allocator shipped with the standard library or implement their own.
- Standard library is still in its early days but already provides a lot of functionality out of the box, from containers to io.
- Using the standard library is optional. When it is used, only what is used gets included. The standard library is built from source every time (though there is caching) and its semantic analysis basically does LTO in the codegen stage so you end up with pretty sli
Read the rest
m binaries.
Here's a couple of examples:
- https://github.com/andrewrk/clashos
- https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen
If you're starting a new operating system project, you might consider using Zig[1] instead of C.
It does all the low level stuff that C does but it has some safety features as well as generics.
The standard library is usable in freestanding mode, even the data structures that allocate memory, because everything takes an allocator as a parameter.
Here are some examples:
* i386 OS: https://github.com/AndreaOrru/zen
* ARM (raspberry pi) OS: https://github.com/andrewrk/clashos
[1]: http://ziglang.org/
In Building an Operating System for the Raspberry Pi