LPlproven·Jan 8, 2025
A noble idea, but Github is literally littered with hobbyist home-grown Unix-like kernels in C.
As an industry are we not supposed to be trying to move away from hoary old unsafe C?
Could we not have a hobbyist educational OSes in more of the C replacements?
Drew DeVault wrote Bunnix in Hare, in one month. There's the proof of concept.
How about tiny toy Unix-likes in Zig, Nim, Crystal, Odin, D, Rust, Circle, Carbon, Austral?
How about ones that aren't ostensibly suitable for such tasks, such as Go or Ada?
Yes I know Ada is not a good fit, but there has already been a Unix-like OS entirely implemented in a derivative of Pascal: TUNIS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUNIS
This might need work from skilled expert practitioners first. That's good. That's what experts are for: teaching, and uplifting newbies.
There was a project to do C# on th
Read the rest
e bare metal.
https://migeel.sk/blog/2023/12/08/building-bare-metal-bootab...
How about a Unix-like in C#? Get the Unix and .NET folks interested in this stuff.
Even if the OS never leads to anything, maybe the tooling might prove useful. I am sure someone somewhere would have uses for bare-metal GoLang.
Saying that, I really don't think we need any more Unix-like OSes. There are far far too many of those already. There is a huge problem space to be explored here, and there used to be fascinating OSes that did things no Unix-like ever did.
OSes that are by modern standards tiny and simple but explored interesting areas of OS design, and are FOSS, with code out there under permissive licenses:
* Plan 9
https://github.com/plan9foundation/plan9
* Inferno
https://github.com/inferno-os/inferno-os
* Symbian
https://github.com/SymbianSource
* Parhelion HeliOS
https://archive.org/details/Heliosukernel
There is already an effort at Plan 9 in Rust:
https://github.com/dancrossnyc/r9
Why not Plan 9 in Zig, or Hare, or even D?
Plan 9 imposes and enforces considerably more simplicity on C as it is: you can't #include stuff that already has #include statements of its own. The result is a compilation speedup of around 3 orders of magnitude. That would be a benefit to the would-be C replacements too, wouldn't it?