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Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

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Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#71
post #6

Wow. Preemptive multitasking, graphical window management, POSIX-like, in a programming language that to my knowledge it hasn't yet been done in... and in just several months of work. There's no smoke and mirrors as far as I can tell. I dug back to the initial commit: https://github.com/ffwff/lilith/commit/c9fa1053dc6a22d630ee6... - and it's just bootstrapping to VGA. Very well done, and inspiring. Makes me want to t…

Maybe it's just because I come from Ruby, but Crystal seems like an amazing language. I'm interested why it seems to be getting little attention compared to Go, Rust, & Julia. It seems in the same league to me. Kotlin and Swift have more obvious reasons for their adoption.

Have been playing with Crystal for several months and still find it amazing what this language can deliver given that it's still relatively new.

Asked my friends to try it out and they love it too. Hopefully we can grow a bigger ecosystem for Crystal to make it a main stream programming language one day.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#72
post #61

Is the dev a high school student? From their blog: https://fw.neocities.org/blog/5.html If so, this is crazy impressive.

If so, it is definitely mind-bending. Makes me wonder what people mean about not being over-ambitious, "avoiding NIH", "worse is better", "minimizing technical risk", etc. Somehow one is made to feel (by no particular person, but by the composite emergent vibe) that there are a hundred and one reasons to be more conservative. I wonder how many people have the audacity to re-imagine their software ground-up, and the t…

The Soul of a New Machine has an amazing passage on a software developer from Data General being too inexperienced to realize that what he was doing couldn't be done, and finishing it in record time.

It's safe to say that people who aren't aware of or ignore limits put out better work on average than people who don't.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#74
post #72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, it is definitely mind-bending. Makes me wonder what people mean about not being over-ambitious, "avoiding NIH", "worse is better", "minimizing technical risk", etc. Somehow one is made to feel (by no particular person, but by the composite emergent vibe) that there are a hundred and one reasons to be more conservative. I wonder how many people have the audacity to re-imagine their software ground-up, and the t…

The Soul of a New Machine has an amazing passage on a software developer from Data General being too inexperienced to realize that what he was doing couldn't be done, and finishing it in record time. It's safe to say that people who aren't aware of or ignore limits put out better work on average than people who don't.

Not sure if it's the same story but there is also the Ivan Sutherland one reported by Alan Kay.

> When asked, “How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?” Ivan replied: “Well, I didn’t know it was hard.”

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#76
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just because I come from Ruby, but Crystal seems like an amazing language. I'm interested why it seems to be getting little attention compared to Go, Rust, & Julia. It seems in the same league to me. Kotlin and Swift have more obvious reasons for their adoption.

I found Crystal about a year ago and absolutely fell in love with it. It just “clicks” for me. My sense from reading most peanut-gallery commentary that the biggest reasons it hasn’t taken off more (yet) are: 1. Real multi-threading (it’s now in alpha - but previously just had single-threaded concurrency - and sorry I might be getting that terminology wrong). 2. Windows support (I personally don’t care but I haven’t…

Lots of the crop of new languages with cleaner designs have huge problems with windows. V doesn't work on windows and zig's compiler fails if you use carriage return newlines. They even built in an error message for it instead of just making the parser work. It's kind of ridiculous how these languages shoot themselves in the foot.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#77
post #72
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, it is definitely mind-bending. Makes me wonder what people mean about not being over-ambitious, "avoiding NIH", "worse is better", "minimizing technical risk", etc. Somehow one is made to feel (by no particular person, but by the composite emergent vibe) that there are a hundred and one reasons to be more conservative. I wonder how many people have the audacity to re-imagine their software ground-up, and the t…

The Soul of a New Machine has an amazing passage on a software developer from Data General being too inexperienced to realize that what he was doing couldn't be done, and finishing it in record time. It's safe to say that people who aren't aware of or ignore limits put out better work on average than people who don't.

That seems decidedly unsafe to say, but even if you’re right, the second paragraph doesn’t follow from the first. “Everyone generalizes from one example! At least, I do.”

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#78
post #35

Just this morning I was pondering the same thing in Elixir. I wonder if Elixir and Crystal compete for ruby developers to pick up

I think Ruby developers are a lot more likely to switch to Crystal than Elixir. Elixir encourages a much more functional style than I think Ruby developers are used to.

When I did a comparison:

Crystal has 1,209 repos https://github.com/topics/crystal

Ruby has 19,721 https://github.com/topics/ruby

For those who needs performance for specific tasks, the option is easy since it’s a small investment to learn Crystal but Elixir is mature.

If we are targeting DevOp, other languages has several advantage like Go for microservices and could be work within mobile app.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#79
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just because I come from Ruby, but Crystal seems like an amazing language. I'm interested why it seems to be getting little attention compared to Go, Rust, & Julia. It seems in the same league to me. Kotlin and Swift have more obvious reasons for their adoption.

What's Crystal's unique selling point? It's older than Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Nim, or even OCaml, and doesn't really offer anything they don't. More Ruby-like syntax? Fine, but most people don't particularly like Ruby syntax.

Kotlin - it's on JVM which is a good thing for some and a bad thing for others. It's easier to distribute standalone crystal binary for example.

Swift - crystal throws exceptions, swift explodes...

Ocaml - the functional approach is not for everyone.

Rust - I like rust a lot. But sometimes I want to write something quick and I'm happy to sacrifice some memory and speed to not have to deal with the ownership issues.

Nim - the most comparable, I guess it's syntax preference at that point

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#80
post #58
post #3

Wow. That's impressive. Crystal is a solid alternative to Go. I gave it a solid look when figuring out which language I should learn. The only reason Crystal didn't make it is because it's just missing some core features. The one that sticks out is there is no way to get the length of a channel last time I looked. But this is impressive and I can't wait to see what's next

It's missing many things that make it a viable language: - libraries - community - support The language itself is not even finish or properly tested.

I can only see 1,209 repos after using Crystal for close to a year, some are no longer maintained. https://github.com/topics/crystal

There are lacking of stories around the cloud computing or any large businesses has success with Crystal. They need more of those to gain support if they don’t want to remain in “uncharted territory” which mentioned in their interview.

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