Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal • Hacker News Board

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#261

Post by ksec » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:39 PM UTC

prox wrote: post #118

kick wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, reminds me of : One day In 1939, George Bernard Dantzig, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, arrived late for a graduate-level statistics class and found two problems written on the board. Not knowing they were examples of “unsolved” statistics problems, he mistook them for part of a homework assignment, jotted them down, and solved them. (The equations Dantzig tackled are more acc…

Sounds like the movie Good Will Hunting.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#262

Post by ksec » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:46 PM UTC

For those who like Crystal, they have bountysource [1] to support their development.

[1] https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/crystal-lang

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#263

Post by loa_in_ » Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 12:22 AM UTC

kick wrote: post #72

ssivark wrote: 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.

It's survivorship bias - you never hear about prople who ignore limits or don't know them and fail. Some limits earn you trouble or penalty by law when broken, so you might get to know them in a less pleasant context.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#264

Post by anthk » Thu, Dec 26, 2019, 4:54 AM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #231

coldtea wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing a specific game or 100 on it != a translation layer from one OS to another is ready or generally usable. Games have minimal dependencies re OS APIs wise. Office apps and other programs make far more extensive use of OS facilities... So hardly "bullshit".

> Games have minimal dependencies re OS APIs wise. Sure, if you exclude "let's use every little quirk and undocumented feature in the graphics and audio and input stacks we can find because gotta go fast sanic noises ". Both games and office software (ab)use OS APIs; the difference is the specific subset of those APIs said programs (ab)use. So yeah, you're right that it ain't "bullshit", but don't write off games as…

DirectX9 is not easy at all, it's almost Glide/Vulkan like low level-ish API. But hey. that's "bullshit". My balls. The above user should try running a pure DX9 game with Wine and GL 2.1 on a Intel Mobile 4 series with no noticeable frame drops. I tried. Hard.

But also, having DX7/8 being almost 100% compatible back in the day was a huge step on stability vs Windows 98, even if the RAM and CPU usage were higher. DX run fast, so did Max Payne.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#265

Post by fluffything » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

gdxhyrd wrote: post #169

fluffything wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm interested why it seems to be getting little attention compared to Go, Rust, & Julia. Rust essentially competes with C and C++ (and maybe D and Nim without their GCs), and the reason it gets hype is because it brings some unique features for that niche. Go brought some unique features as well (goroutines done right), and it is pushed by a major player. In Julia's niche, you only really have Julia and Fortran -…

> C#, Kotlin and Swift are the system API languages of major platforms (MS, Apple, Android). No, the system API of those systems is exposed in C, ObjC and C respectively. You may be thinking about the most common language in those platforms nowadays (and their respective APIs).

> No, the system API of those systems is exposed in C, ObjC and C respectively.

This is incorrect. Microsoft doesn't have a C compiler, only a C++ compiler, so the lower level language on Windows is C++. Yet for application development, the application language is C#.

On Apple, the lowest level language is ObjC, and the application language is Swift. And on Android, its C + Kotlin.

Doing application development on, e.g., Android, using the C NDK, is pretty much unsupported, since the NDK is mostly undocumented, and changes often. The only stable API for application development is Java, or Kotlin.