Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thoughts exactly, I know people have their own tastes and preferences, but I think it's off-putting to newcomers.
If it's off-putting to _puritan_ newcomers, then good riddance, I guess.
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Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
201–210 of 265 posts
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Does anyone actually care about Windows support?
The StackOverflow 2019 survey suggests 47% of developers are on Windows (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...). This is a big chunk of developers you can't reach well, if you are limited to Linux and/or macOS. Windows devs might desire to have Crystal because they want to build native apps, but the reality is many people use the OS for other reasons that are beyond their control.
I don't find it surprising to see this question in a discussion involving a language related to Ruby. It's a bit sad it still comes up, but there is overwhelming demand for better Windows support of this and any other good or promising software running on Linux or macOS.
Historically, Python has had reasonable Windows support. It got to a point where it was OK and stopped improving. In recent years there has been more attention and improvements. This investment has meant that the language is reasonably viable for a lot of tasks on Windows. This doesn't mean that there hasn't been an influx of folks at points with little knowledge or care for Windows, but lots of packages work reasonably well.
Ruby is a different story. Rails was the big growth driver and there was a narrow focus. The pattern emerged of dev on macOS and deployment on Linux. I personally credit the tropes about only seeing Macs at dev conferences in a big way to Rails. The result is that it's infeasible to use Windows directly and you are best to go with a VM, or now WSL 2.0. It didn't have to be this way when a big chunk of developers are Windows. Rails could have taken an even bigger chunk of the market if Ruby had better Windows support.
Strategically, Crystal and other languages that want real adoption and the things that go with that (more recognition, more libraries, more real world use, more contributors, etc.) need to work out a good plan for Windows support.
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#203Wow. 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…
Sorry for the late reply (being rate limited) Thanks! Originally it only started as an experiment to see how far I could go making an OS in a high-level (higher than C at least) language, I was only planning to build a monotasking DOS system. Around this time, Andreas Kling started to show us his SerenityOS, which was one of the factors propelling me to reach this point. So shout outs to AK! Yeah! It's pretty fun to…
I wonder what a D OS would be like.
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#204Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#205Oh wow someone actually posted this! Thanks a lot for the comments and criticisms guys, really means lot to me. Before I go I'll answer some questions, so ask them away!
1. Would you consider this project "mature", or still rapidly evolving? Any particular aspects you are actively working on?
2. Any other project ideas you are toying around with?
Kudos and cheers!
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#206This is one of the most fun things I've seen in a while. Congrats.
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are aware that Windows thoroughly dominates the Desktop computing space right?
Sure but from a developer's perspective I've never found it compelling
So therefore it must not be to anyone else right?
Is this some kind of variation on Works for Me(tm)?
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's older than Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Nim, or even OCaml, and doesn't really offer anything they don't. Crystal is only five years old. Nim is 11, Rust is 9, Kotlin is 8, OCaml is 23 and Swift is 5. Basically, Crystal is tied with Swift as the youngest. What it offers right now is a simple porting process for those with Ruby codebases.
I think they meant younger. But, yeah, besides the syntax familiarity for Ruby programmers it doesn't seem offer much that the others do.
> I think they meant younger.
The "even OCaml" is what threw me. Still not quite sure if they meant older or younger from it.
> But, yeah, besides the syntax familiarity for Ruby programmers it doesn't seem offer much that the others do.
A familiar syntax is a huge benefit in a lot of contexts. There's plenty of Ruby-only shops around the world. Making a faster and statically-typed language accessible to them is a decent niche.
Crystal isn't quite Ruby. It has type guarantees that Ruby doesn't, which makes it easier to maintain. The async and parallel stories are also immensely better in Crystal than Ruby.
The "Nil is a compile-time error" is also a feature I highly appreciate.
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two other languages that I can think of that have their roots in South America are Lua and Elixir.
i've been a huge fan of elixir ever since i found it a few years ago. The main web framework (phoenix) is doing some really cool stuff right now with live-view, too, and I'm pretty darn excited about it. I've always thought that the best system for a web server would be erlang OTP, because of the design based around uptime and system recovery. It has been proven in production by a few companies now in web dev, and er…
Isn't elixir just syntactic sugar on top of Erlang semantics?
Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal
#210Wow. 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…
Sorry for the late reply (being rate limited) Thanks! Originally it only started as an experiment to see how far I could go making an OS in a high-level (higher than C at least) language, I was only planning to build a monotasking DOS system. Around this time, Andreas Kling started to show us his SerenityOS, which was one of the factors propelling me to reach this point. So shout outs to AK! Yeah! It's pretty fun to…
How much experience do you have in OS dev before you jumped into this project?