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The 4th Year of SerenityOS

serenityos.org

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Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#111

Post by emptyparadise »

kramerger wrote: post #62
akling wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are already powerful enough! Some of our most active developers today didn't even know C++ when they started. If you're interested, look for something small that annoys you, and then see if you can't figure out enough of the code to fix it. :^)

Andreas, you are underestimating the complexity of C++ for mere mortals. Maybe you should take a break from SerenityOS and write a book about the useful/practical subset of the C++ language??

I've been sneaking peeks at the SerenityOS documentation and style guide - it's great stuff. I think I'd rather see that expanded further.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#112

Post by chillfox »

ghostly_s wrote: post #106
chillfox wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super welcoming community + a clear and strong vision to guide the project. Other OS projects I have seen either lack vision (same as x, but written in y), or they are just for the personal learning of the developer who started it.

Is that vision written down somewhere? Surely there is something more than "Unix-like core with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software" keeping people engaged with this project?

That is pretty much it, + everything in one repo so that you can fix bugs anywhere in the stack when encountering them.

While "Unix-like core with the look&feel of 1990s productivity software" sounds simple, it's more than what most new OS projects I have seen provide and it very clearly signals who it's for.

The "look&feel of 1990s productivity software", communicates that the UI will use consistent elements across applications, which is something you only find in Mac OSX these days.

The Super welcoming community is the other half keeping people engaged that you are looking for.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#113

Post by nomel »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #51
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #4

Fantastic progress. My only concern is looking at it... I can't help but worry slightly about feature creep. We went from an OS, to an OS + Web Browser, to an OS + Web Browser + Programming Language. Next year it might add an Office Suite at this rate. Edit: I don't mean this as a bad thing, just that it would be a shame to get so large that everything becomes half-baked and overwhelming to finish.

For many people a web browser and an office suite is all they use a computer for. If anything an office suite should be expected.

I have trouble believing that an OS, especially a graphical one, can be effectively developed/tested without having some GUI apps developed in parallel. Eat your own dog food and all.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#114

Post by rewgs »

systemvoltage wrote: post #39
rewgs wrote: post #33

This is just so cool and inspiring to me. I check out pretty much everything Andreas puts out. I wonder if we're watching something comparable to the birth of Linux. I'm not insinuating that Linux would go away or die or anything -- that's absurd -- but I just mean perhaps over time SerenityOS will become more and more used as a "real" OS. For what purpose(s)? No idea. But the whole project really seems to have stayi…

He streams regularly, check it out and support if you can: https://www.youtube.com/c/AndreasKling/videos

Yup, I watch his streams religiously.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#115

Post by low_tech_punk »

stavros wrote: post #73
low_tech_punk wrote: post #66

This project embodies Donald Knuth's principle of being the author of software, rather than just consumers of other's APIs. Yes, it takes patience and chutzpah, but I can also imagine how satisfying it is to build something from scratch and see all the pieces coming together into a working OS. And if you put your heart (and time) to it, you can build anything from scratch. A lesson the newer generation of developers…

> This project embodies Donald Knuth's principle of being the author of software, rather than just consumers of other's APIs. I feel that this comment unfairly criticizes people who build on other things. This OS runs on hardware, which is someone else's API, and is a hobby project, as far as I can tell. If someone wants to build something cool that uses others' APIs as a hobby project, more power to them.

Thanks yardshop for clarifying my point of view. And I agree with you stavros. There should be multiple ways of building things, some of which must be practical. Most of our day-to-day job should not be building things from scratch, even though there is a lot of fun in doing so :)

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#117

Post by saagarjha »

jbirer wrote: post #100
phist_mcgee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, by using modern tools.

Modern tools are good, but the culture around it is pretty toxic, and in my own opinion, cringy. 10 years ago you would get booed for saying things like "Unused RAM is wasted ram, so let's build this in Electron". I am happy to see a pushback.

“Unused RAM is wasted RAM” is only relevant if you’re writing an OS.

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#119

Post by dcsommer »

ndiddy wrote: post #79
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is good for Jakt but why another language?

This post goes over his motivation: https://awesomekling.github.io/Memory-safety-for-SerenityOS/

I appreciate the honesty in the FAQ. No thread safety and still some open questions about iterator invalidation. I look forward to seeing what they come up with!

Borrow checker style "Aliasability XOR Mutability" does restrict a lot of valid programs, but has some nice properties for scaling large codebases besides the obvious performance advantage of ARC. I can see how this kind of big "down payment" to restructure programs might go against the incremental/fun approach embraced for SerenityOS. More reading on AXM and it's benefits for correctness:

* https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/17/the-problem-wi...

* http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2013/06/11/on-t...

* https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2015/05/03/where-rust-rea...

Re: The 4th Year of SerenityOS

#120

Post by kaveh808 »

rewgs wrote: post #33

This is just so cool and inspiring to me. I check out pretty much everything Andreas puts out. I wonder if we're watching something comparable to the birth of Linux. I'm not insinuating that Linux would go away or die or anything -- that's absurd -- but I just mean perhaps over time SerenityOS will become more and more used as a "real" OS. For what purpose(s)? No idea. But the whole project really seems to have stayi…

> having fun and simply building something because you want it to exist are valid goals in and of themselves.

I agree. Sums up my own thinking when I started my 3D graphics system in Common Lisp a few months ago. Enjoying writing code from scratch, even basic UI widgets on top of OpenGL.

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