Comment by lproven
2 years ago
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 the 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?
> 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.
Isn't it? There is a very well-developed kernel written in ADA with SPARK and formally verified at that: https://ironclad.nongnu.org
And PASCAL-derived languages were very popular for operating systems in the 80s. To name a few: Apple's LISA OS, DEC's VAXELN, and OBERON. There were others as well that didn't quite make it, like DEC's MICA and Acorn's ARX.
Thanks for this!
I did not realise VAXELN was in Pascal. The others I did know of, yes, although Ironclad only from another comment in this thread.
> Yes I know Ada is not a good fit
Why?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUNIS
Interesting; do you know whether the source code is available somewhere?
No, sadly, I don't know of any.
You might ask co-developer Prof James Cordy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cordy
Or approach the University of Toronto: https://www.utoronto.ca/
I had a look at the available literature. Many of the ideas are pretty similar to the work of Per Brinch Hansen a decade earlier. Actually the successor of Concurrent Euclid, called Object-Oriented Turing, is pretty interesting, because it is still a Pascal descendant, but supports modules, declarations in the statement flow, OO and concurrent programming. As it seems it's worth a closer look.
Dijkstra famously said that programmers who started with BASIC are "mentally mutilated". But I think this applies a lot more to C and UNIX.
Most of them don't seem to understand how anything substantially different could exist in the world of computing - every other language and operating system is seen as either an inferior copy, or as another layer of abstraction building on top of C and UNIX.
> Dijkstra famously said that programmers who started with BASIC are "mentally mutilated"
He knew how to make friends.
To be fair, he was talking about classic BASIC which didn't even have user defined procedures but just goto and gosub similar to jumps and calls in assembly language. I remember when I started learning Pascal after BASIC on the Apple II and there was so much to unlearn about programming because how you wrote BASIC was so different from any other high level programming language.
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Exactly my own sentiments!
There are very good kernels written in Ada, like Ironclad[1].
Besides, what's the point of this comment? What if people wanted to write a million more Unix-like kernels in C? Do you think this is bad? Why do you care? If you want, just write your own in whatever language you want, with whatever design you want.
> Why not Plan 9 in Zig, or Hare, or even D?
Because nobody to this point was interested in doing this. It's really that simple.
[1] https://ironclad.nongnu.org/
I agree. the GP's comment has a flavour of "people shouldn't like the things I don't like".
"Make your own kernel" is a thing-in-itself, and "runs on <X> hardware/VM" + "provides <Y>-like API for programs" are tangible, concrete goals to aim for, even if you personally don't like the <Y> API or the architectural choices it implies.
To give an analogy: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ is an amazing learning experience, even though games other than Tetris should and do exist
Personally, I like the AROS project, aiming to provide an operating system that implements the AmigaOS APIs and runs on many architectures, but lots of users are interested in running it on 680x0 Amigas and spiritually-related PowerPC devices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
It's OK for programmers to write a thing just for the learning experience. If it gains adoptees, that's a happy accident.
> There are very good kernels written in Ada, like Ironclad[1].
Interesting. Thanks.
> Besides, what's the point of this comment? What if people wanted to write a million more Unix-like kernels in C? Do you think this is bad? Why do you care?
Because it seems to me that modern OS design is caught in a deep deep rut, and the "OS in 1000 lines" article that we are discussing is digging that rut even deeper.
Don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Make interesting new mistakes. It's more fun.
> Make interesting new mistakes. It's more fun.
Now’s your chance to move the state of the art forward!
OS’s written in Ada included MaRTE OS (open source), Intel’s BiiN system, and the Army Secure Operating System (ASOS) (IIRC).
The Muen Seperation Kernel (muen.sk) is a secure hypervisor written in SPARK Ada.
Ada was designed for low-level programming. It makes sense it does operating systems fairly easily. Parts of them will break its safety features. They can be validated with external tools, though.
Another trick, used in House with H layer, is to wrap the lowest-level parts which you might do in assembly. Build the GC or whatever, too. Then, everything else is in the higher-level language. These data, the lowest-level portions can be specified, verified, and implemented.
Fair point.
I was slightly more getting at it being not a natural fit for a Unix-like OS but I accept your point.
AFAIK, sadly, Intel BiiN is lost to history now. A Register reader wrote in to me to tell me that he was one of the developers.
That's cool that you heard from one.
What I really wanted from a developer was the i960. Specifically, the version with the object protections. That might be worth buying today for secure, embedded work. If I found the right person, I'd ask them to open-source, or at least dual-license, the i960. For embedded systems, leave it as a RISC-V alternative or port it to RISC-V.
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SPIN in Modula-2: https://www-spin.cs.washington.edu/
Symbian is anything but simple!
:-) Fair point.
Very very small, compared to Android or iOS or any modern Linux, though.