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This sounds a lot like a Smalltalk running as the OS until they started talking about implementing a systems language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're just now implementing the implementation language, R'. They haven't done their due diligence: there's already a well-known language named R: https://www.r-project.org/ . The prime isn't sufficient disambiguation.
well-known "language" (air quotes)
I don't see that in this project. This isn't defined by a clean slate. It is defined by properties that it does not want to be.
Off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of hardware architectures that would require all-new software. There would be amazing opportunities for discovery writing software for these things. The core principles of the software for such a machine could be based upon a solid philosophical consideration of what a computer should be. Not just "One that doesn't have social media" but what are truly the needs of the user. This is not a simple problem. If it should facilitate but also protect, when should it say no?
If software can run other software, should there be an independent notion of how that software should be facilitated?
What should happen when the user directs two pieces of software to perform contradictory things? What gets facilitated, what gets disallowed.
I'd love to see some truly radical designs. Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash, machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).
A n=32 system would have four billion cores and 4 terabytes if RAM and nearly enough persistent storage but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.
You could probably start with a much lower n. Then consider how to write software for it that meets the principles that meets the criteria of how it should behave.
Different, clean slate, not easy.
> RadiantOS treats your computer as an extension of your mind. It’s designed to capture your knowledge, habits, and workflows at the system layer. Data is interlinked like a personal wiki, not scattered across folders. This sounded really interesting... till I read this: > It’s an AI-native operating system. Artificial neural networks are built in and run locally. The OS understands what applications can do, what the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's prob a balance. Sure, C is king....but if you are starting from scratch...do you REALLY need it or could you design something even better? Maybe, maybe not. I've programmed for a long time, but always struggled with Assembly and C, so take my views with a grain of salt.
I don't think C is king anymore. They could use Rust with nostd, or Zig, or C++. Anything (low level enough) is better than an entirely new language.
Why does the website look like my monitor is dying? Black on dark grey, seriously?
The AI art makes it look like vapor.
They want to implement custom hardware with support for audio, video, everything, a completely new language, a ground-up OS, and also include AI.
Sounds easy enough.
The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.
I think those principles would embody the notion that the same thing cannot serve all people equally. Simultaneously, for people to interact, interoperability is required. For example, I don't think everyone should use the same word processor. It is likely that blind people would be served best by a word processor designed by blind people. Interoperable systems would aim to neither penalise or favour users for using a different program for the same task.
I'm interested to hear about the plans or capabilities in R' or Radiance for things like concurrent programming, asynchronous/scheduling, futures, and invisible or implied networking.
AI is here and will be a big part of future personal computing. I wonder what type of open source accelerator for neural networks is available as a starting point. Or if such a thing exists.
One of the opportunities for AI is in compression codecs that could provide for very low latency low bandwidth standards for communication and media browsing.
For users, the expectation will shortly be that you can talk to your computer verbally or send it natural language requests to accomplish tasks. It is very interesting to think how this could be integrated into the OS for example as a metadata or interface standard. Something like a very lightweight version of MCP or just a convention for an SDK filename (since software is distributed as source) could allow for agents to be able to use any installed software by default. Built in embeddings or vector index could also be very useful, maybe to filter relevant SDKs for example.
If content centric data is an assumption and so is AI, maybe we can ditch Google and ChatGPT and create a distributed hash embedding table or something for finding or querying content.
It's really fun to dream about idealized or future computers. Congratulations for getting so far into the details of a real system.
One of my more fantasy style ideas for a desktop uses a curved continuous touch screen. The keyboard/touchpad area is a pair of ergonomic concave curves that meet in the middle and level out to horizontal workspaces on the sides. The surface has a SOTA haptic feedback mechanism.
The thing that always worries me about these clean-slate designs is the fear that they'll ignore accessibility for disabled people, e.g. blind people, and then either the system will remain inaccessible, or accessibility will have to be retrofitted later.
Yeah, this is concerning. Although, if the system is architected well, accessibility features ought to be something that can be added as an extension. What is a screen reader but something that can read the screen? It needs metadata from the GUI, which ought to be available if the system is correctly architected. It needs navigation order, which ought to be something that can be added later with a separate metadata c…
Good screen readers track GUI state which makes it hard to tack on accessibility after the fact. They depend on the identity of the elements on the screen so they can detect relevant changes.