Writing a Unix clone in about a month
drewdevault.com
Writing a Unix clone in about a month
1–10 of 140 posts
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#2Impressive, super cool, and inspiring!
Example of “creating something impressive in X days” requires a lot of experience and talent that is built over years.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#3Missed opportunity to call it Drewnix.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#4Impressive, super cool, and inspiring! Example of “creating something impressive in X days” requires a lot of experience and talent that is built over years .
... and also a previously kernel implementation called Helios to provide a lot of the lowest level code. Not trying to knock down the accomplishment, but DD is pretty open about the fact that a lot of the speed of this project was dependent on having done Helios first (and reusing code from it).
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#5Code is here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/bunnix/tree/master
GPLv3 license.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#6Quite cool, by making use of Hare instead.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#7I was interested in Hare until I found this immensely self-defeating FAQ item: https://harelang.org/documentation/faq.html#will-hare-suppor...
As a baseline, I support developers using whatever license they would like, and targeting whatever operating systems, indeed, writing whatever code they would like in the process.
That doesn't make this specific policy a good idea. Even FSF, generally considered the most extreme (or, if you prefer, principled) exponents of the Free Software philosophy, support Windows and POSIX. They may grumble and call it Woe32, but Stallman has said some cogent things about how the fight for a world free of proprietary software is more readily advanced by making sure that Free Software projects run on proprietary systems.
They do at least license the library code under MPL, so merely using Hare doesn't lock you into a license. But I wonder about the longevity of a language where the attitude toward 95+% of the desktop is "unsupported, don't ask questions on our forums, we don't want you here".
Ironically, a Google search for "harelang repo" has as the first hit an unofficial macOs port, and the actual SourceHut repo doesn't show up in the first page of results.
Languages either snowball or fizzle out. I'm typing this on a Mac, but I could pick up a Linux machine right now if I were of a mind to. But why would I invest in learning a language which imposes a purity test on developers, when even the FSF doesn't? A great deal of open source and free software gets written on Macs, and in fact, more than you might think on Windows as well.
From where I sit, what differentiates Hare from Odin and Zig, is just this attitude of purity and exclusion. I wish you all happy hacking, of course, and success. But I'm pessimistic about the latter.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#8Very cool. Most of these Unix clones are usually written in C.
This one is written in a new programming language.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#9I was interested in Hare until I found this immensely self-defeating FAQ item: https://harelang.org/documentation/faq.html#will-hare-suppor... As a baseline, I support developers using whatever license they would like, and targeting whatever operating systems, indeed, writing whatever code they would like in the process. That doesn't make this specific policy a good idea. Even FSF, generally considered the most extre…
Sounds like you and the Hare people have different definitions of success. As for "languages either snowball or fizzle out," I feel like that's pretty dismissive of a lot of languages that have been steadily marching on for decades even without this rockstar status.
Not every band has to hit the Billboard charts to be worth listening to.
Re: Writing a Unix clone in about a month
#10Hare looks like an interesting language.
Though this limitation will limit its adoption in this multicore age I think:
From the FAQ https://harelang.org/documentation/faq.html
....
Can I use multithreading in Hare?
Probably not.
We prefer to encourage the use of event loops (see unix::poll or hare-ev) for multiplexing I/O operations, or multiprocessing with shared memory if you need to use CPU resources in parallel.
It is, strictly speaking, possible to create threads in a Hare program. You can link to libc and use pthreads, or you can use the clone(2) syscall directly. Operating systems implemented in Hare, such as Helios, often implement multi-threading.
However, the upstream standard library does not make reentrancy guarantees, so you are solely responsible for not shooting your foot off.