Theseus

When I clicked, I thought this was going to be about the Theseus operating system [0]. Running win32 programs on it would have been ... interesting. It too uses WASM, but for running non-Rust programs in sandboxes. Everything else is Rust. Hmm.. Last updated in 2024 though. 0: https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus

I wasn't but I'll have to read more! Some good relevant discussion here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7554921 . I wanted to keep this project in user-space, but there's a lot of interesting ground on the OS side of things too. Something like Theseus <https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus> is also interesting, providing similar protections (in theory) by enforced compiler invariants rather than hardware features.

Yeah, also https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus One could also run virtual machines for end user workloads under a Theseus design. (The other meaning, not bytecode interpreter.) That sounds like a nice way to real world applicability, to me. History has shown reimplementing Linux syscalls is not realistic (gVisor, WSL1).

> significantly reduce the amount of C code but I'm not sure you could eliminate it entirely Theseus is a research OS written in Rust that seems to include C purely to show how to support programs written in C (libc and a demo app). https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus It contains some 1000+ lines of ASM for the early boot from BIOS, that look like they originate from https://os.phil-opp.com/minimal-rust-kernel/ -- I think UEFI boot would have been doable in pure Rust (https://github.com/rust-osdev/uefi-rs).

Theseus is an example of (2), in Rust, without bytecode. As far as I understand, done by enforcing no-unsafe etc rules in a blessed compiler, so basically source code becomes the equivalent of the byte code in your thinking. At a glance it's very similar to Midori, but the details of how it's done are quite different. In Theseus, drivers, applications etc are ELF objects, dynamically linked all together into one executable (which is also the kernel), with some neat tricks like hot upgrades. https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus https://www.theseus-os.com/

You might be thinking of Midori. Joe Duffy has written a lot about it on his blog: <https://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/> They forked C#/.Net, taking the async concept to its extreme and changed the exception/error model, among other things. There are several other OS projects based on Rust, relying on the memory-safety of the language for memory-protection. Personally, I think the most interesting of those might be Theseus: <https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus>

I believe that Tock (tockos.org) and Theseus (https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus) are in this area a bit as well, just from an actual OS perspective. I don't know much about this area, but it would be wonderful if these could work with the Libre compute boards, like the AM Logic S905X (Lepotato) or the Rock chip, since they're so much cheaper than a Pi. Would be great to get a dedicated simple system up to toy with Rust OS for only 30$.

I wonder if somehow someday Microsoft Windows can be rerooted as something like wine running in user space of a rust os like https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus

I mean, there are several rust kernel/os projects in progress. One project that's pushing on the boundary of safety and composability is Thesus, which takes language safety to new ground by shifting traditionally OS-level responsibilities like resource management all the way down to typechecks in the language, and also explores a way of updating any core OS component on a live running system. https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus There's also KataOS which google just recently announced: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/10/announcing-kataos-... As you note, these things take time, I agree with sibling that none of them are likely to be "enterprise-grade" or "production ready" this decade.

Check out theseus! It's exploring some of these ideas. https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus

Source code at https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus