Comment by hulitu
18 hours ago
> To be successful, many more components are needed.
What is the purpose of this OS ? Can it mint Bitcoin ? Can it do fluid dynamics simulation ? Can it act as an interface to a database ? Can it host a database ? Is it interactive ? What kind of interface it presents to the user ?
> What is the purpose of this OS ?
What is the purpose of any OS?
As all the modern ones slowly converge on similar attributes of being incomprehensibly vast codebases unreadable by any human, typically implemented in C or something closely related to it, using a similar underlying register-machine model, there is value in simply being small, simple, readable, able to do useful work, and being different. If something is also provably correct that's just the icing on the cake.
One application would be safety and security critical real-time systems that also need significant amount of processing power
That’s a rather luridly practical view that’s entirely out of sync with academia and basic research that provides tangible benefits much further down the line.
Yes, but basic reseach in IT is still not random, but usually has a clear goal, or at least some scope. Like indeed, focus on security? Focus on speed? Focus on reliability? Focus on energy efficency (because it is supposed to run on a tiny embedded device for long).
And the gimmick here seems to be in fact, that it is supposed to be flexibel
"is not a conventional operating system, but contains composable components for creating custom operating systems that are specific to a particular task. Components are joined together using the Microkit tool"
Those are applications, not operating systems. With occasional exceptions, you can run any application on any operating system.
That begs the point: Each application will often run better on some OSes than on others. For example, high traffic websites usually aren't run on Windows 11.
There is an example of interface in the docs: https://lionsos.org/docs/examples/kitty/
no operating system does. That's application software you're thinking of. So no, it can't. But neither can windows, linux, macos, solaris, templeOS or any others
Could have been done for fun. You wouldn't understand.
Yeah, Linus, what's the point?
Hardly a fair comparison. Linus wanted an OS that would run on his own PC and let him do his Unix homework assignments.