I'm very impressed any time I see people pouring so much work over long periods of time into hobby projects.
A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#12Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
You need POSIX to compile nearly any program
That his advantage. He doesn't want to, rather write everything anew from scratch.
Also signals. With a microkernel you won't need signals
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#13Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
>why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility
Because existing desktop applications can be ported to ToaruOS
>why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace?
This is a design choice, microkernels aren't necessarily better than hybrid, they're slower, harder to debug and process management can be complicated
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#14No inbuilt documentation system called Index?
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#15Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
You need POSIX to compile nearly any program
So, a preliminary problem for many OS-from-scratch projects intending to create "New Different Great OS" will be to have a language implementation which does not expect posix.
It depends on the goal. If you want to compile pre-existing software for it, or if you want to really "start anew".
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#16Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
Shallow dismissal of other people's work.
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#17Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
You need POSIX to compile nearly any program
True, and as another commenter hinted at, you're free to do your own hobby project however you please, there's not a wrong way to do so if you find it fulfilling.
But at the same time, it does make me sad that most hobby OSes end up seeking POSIX compatibility, because that means being destined to essentially either be another unix-variant or develop a unix-variant inside some subsystem of your OS.
Yes, being unix-like means you gain access to a trove of software and libraries that makes porting applications much easier, but it also limits the potential be truly different and experiment, as your end result will look like "yet another unix" with misc. improvements.
Since I think the enjoyment of building something like this comes from the satisfaction of building an OS from the ground up, I don't think it matters, but it would be cool to see more hobby OSes try more exotic ideas and runtimes.
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#18Back in 2014 this was posted before, so before the first "release" version and when there were external dependencies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8566217 (26 comments).
At that time the repo probably looked like this:
https://github.com/klange/toaruos/tree/9f34619078f92bd7d9815...
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#19Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
You need POSIX to compile nearly any program
For *nix maybe, but there are many other non-POSIX operating systems in use today.
Re: A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system
#20Then why in the heck is he going for POSIX compatibility, when he can afford the luxury of not having to deal with blocking syscalls and all this crap? Much easier and safer multithreading. Also faster. And why we are there, why not a safer microkernel, keeping everything in userspace? Questions over questions.
Shallow dismissal of other people's work.
Shallow dismissal of other people’s comments.