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Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

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Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#61

Is the dev a high school student? From their blog: https://fw.neocities.org/blog/5.html If so, this is crazy impressive.

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 technical chops to actually implement it. The verve is refreshing. Kudos to the author, and also thanks.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#62
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lacks first-class Windows support. That's it. That's why it fails to gain the traction it deserves.

That never stopped the Go community from porting Go to Windows. It was never ported by core maintainers, but by Go developers themselves.

Go still lacks Windows support for certain features, e.g. plugins.

And wanting to be part of Google team helped many community contributions. Easy to compare with how much community contributions were made to Inferno and Limbo.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting choice of syscalls: https://github.com/ffwff/lilith/blob/master/userspace/librar... . No fork; instead it seems to implement spawnv.

AFAIK fork() is specific to UNIX and its descendants; DOS, Windows, and many(most?) other OSs don't have it either.

Sure, but an OS that self-describes as "POSIX-like" would be expected to follow the UNIX approach to things.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#64
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use graphical applications with WSL?

If you install an X server for Windows, yes.

I've purchased X410 for this. Since then I haven't looked to see if there are free implementations of an X server that work nicely with WSL.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#65
post #41
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont believe she is underage. But she is half naked

And the windows are carefully positioned as to put her at the focus of the screenshot. And the project is named after a succubus? The overt objectification is unnecessary and unprofessional.

> unprofessional

It's... not professional. It's a (neat) hobby project.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#66

Neat project, though slightly undermined by the drawing of the half-naked underage girl in the readme

My thoughts exactly, I know people have their own tastes and preferences, but I think it's off-putting to newcomers.

Perfectly fine as per European standards.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#67

Just this morning I was pondering the same thing in Elixir. I wonder if Elixir and Crystal compete for ruby developers to pick up

Interestingly apart from the ruby like syntax they seem to be quite different languages from my limited exposure, in terms of the domains they target (elixir - distributed systems, crystal - whatever go/rust are known for minus distributed systems?), the type system (dynamic vs static), deployment story (elixir - mix based, crystal - binary deployment), the standard libraries they leverage etc.

It seems the sum total of them covers a lot of ground from writing quick CLI apps to large distributed systems for developers familiar with Ruby.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#68
post #25
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found Crystal about a year ago and absolutely fell in love with it. It just “clicks” for me. My sense from reading most peanut-gallery commentary that the biggest reasons it hasn’t taken off more (yet) are: 1. Real multi-threading (it’s now in alpha - but previously just had single-threaded concurrency - and sorry I might be getting that terminology wrong). 2. Windows support (I personally don’t care but I haven’t…

> Windows support WSL support maybe?

It works great under WSL, but as others note, it needs first-class Windows support to really take off.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#69
post #41
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont believe she is underage. But she is half naked

And the windows are carefully positioned as to put her at the focus of the screenshot. And the project is named after a succubus? The overt objectification is unnecessary and unprofessional.

Lighten up, Francis.

Re: Lilith: x86-64 OS written in Crystal

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just because I come from Ruby, but Crystal seems like an amazing language. I'm interested why it seems to be getting little attention compared to Go, Rust, & Julia. It seems in the same league to me. Kotlin and Swift have more obvious reasons for their adoption.

Didn't Crystal run into a major development roadblock a couple(?) years ago? Something about a fatal design flaw in the type system which led to exponential blowup in larger programs. I haven't been able to surface the relevant GitHub threads again, but whatever it was, I guess they worked past it eventually.

Yew, they tried to do whole-program type inference a la ML. That was a long time ago, modern Crystal has you indicate parameter and return types.
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