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Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

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Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#3
I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort.

Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#4

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

Most of the ones I've seen were learning experiments. A really really good way to understand something is to build it.

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#6

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

If you think of an OS as solely something that sits on your desktop, then sure, but this is fairly myopic (and defeatist). There are lots of small, proprietary and often embedded operating systems that rely on the same principles established by present and past OS.

Writing operating systems is also a great way/introduction to work on operating systems, and it's a fairly distinct area of development. It's hard to get day-to-day overlap if you're working on things that don't have the constraints and operating system does.

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#7

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

It's usually a learning project. The same way tons of people implement web servers but ultimately use something out of the box in production.

https://github.com/klange/toaruos << example of a hobby OS taken farther than most I've seen.

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#8

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

ever heard of fun? or learning? not everything needs to have the potential for monetization to be worthwhile; it can just be interesting. this is actually something that has been difficult for me to internalize, but i am much happier for it. no less ambitious, but i've found that there are a lot of nice (pointless) things that contribute to my happiness in addition to success.

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#9

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

Operating systems' success is fundamentally based on their popularity. Popularity resembles an exponential distribution, therefore there can only be a small number of popular ones with a long long tail of less and less popular ones. Here, popularity is a positive feedback loop, where the more popular it is the more developers target it, and the more it's targeted the more it's developed internally, which makes it better and therefore more popular.

That doesn't mean it's useless to develop them. If you set your sights low (playing around, learning, academic) you can still benefit from them without them being a huge success by popularity standards.

Re: Gopher-OS: A Proof of Concept OS Written in Go

#10

I've never really understood OS:es. Why are so many people creating them, yet so few have any success? I've must have seen a dozen OS:es over the past two years on HN, most developed by people having no confidence in calling it a serious effort. Why care about OS:es when there is no room for anyone on that level of abstraction apart from a handful developers at MS, Apple and Google?

Having no confidence in the project is part of the path to success

"I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu)"

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