91–100 of 152 posts
Can an operating system be developed from scratch using a safe language such as Rust? If yes, why people still even think about doing it with unsafe languages?
Rust has changed a lot since then, but you might take a look there.
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It's a really annoying widespread opinion. I've been looking for people who really do write OSes in modern C++.
BeOS, Symbian, L4, Genode, Mac OS X drivers, and big parts of Windows are all examples of C++ use in OS development.
They had zero vendors willing to put their OS on a box and resell it because MS threatened the vendors with pulling their right to sell Windows if they did. This wasn't particular to Be, but to any other OS.
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I don't write OSes in modern C++ at the moment (most of my day job is embedded Linux nowadays, go figure...) but I've seen a lot of sane, OS-level C++ code. Even C++ code that I have bad memories about (uh, Symbian) is partly justifiable. The only real beef I have with C++ is its complexity. As I did less and less high-level programming, I forgot about many of C++'s pitfalls and nowadays I'm always tiptoeing when I h…
The STL might be the best programming success story. It used to be awful , but now I rank it among the best standard libraries of any language.
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BeOS, Symbian, L4, Genode, Mac OS X drivers, and big parts of Windows are all examples of C++ use in OS development.
BeOS is the reason I learned C++. I don't recall exactly, but either I didn't understand how or there was no other option but C++ if one wanted to hit the BeOS API. Pity Be Inc. got shafted so bad by MS monopoly abuse. They had zero vendors willing to put their OS on a box and resell it because MS threatened the vendors with pulling their right to sell Windows if they did. This wasn't particular to Be, but to any oth…
However regarding Microsoft, I actually think that vendors were as guilty as Microsoft.
They could have chosen not to take Microsoft's discount and try to sell alternative OSes, even if it meant having to face a few challenges.
The one that takes is as guilty as the one that gives.
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IncludeOS? [0] From the CppCon 2016 presentation description: "Early in the design process we made a hard choice; no C interfaces and no blocking POSIX calls. We’ve done everything from scratch with modern C++ 11/14 - Including device drivers and the complete network stack all the way through ethernet, IP and ARP, up to and including UDP, TCP and recently also an http / REST API framework. To achieve maximum efficien…
Nice :) I didn't know this project. I'll definitely read about this project.
We also have a chat if you have any questions: https://gitter.im/hioa-cs/IncludeOS
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The context of course was portability to different compilers, not architectures.
Oh gotcha... I interpreted Linus's comment about archs. Boost is supported on far less archs than the Linux kernel is: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/master/libs/context/doc/html/c...
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Totally agreed with your comment until that: > as long as you have a disciplined team and sane coding guidelines Is it not possible at all anymore to just hire people actually understanding what they are doing? Or cargo cult is here to stay? I am sorry - please don't take that as a personal attack, but explaining people that C++ can actually be used in OS development by mindlessly sticking to some rules doesn't seem…
It's more that certain features can be way more expensive than they look. e.g. say you're working on an embedded system, and you want a string, so you do: std::string s = "fnord"; At first it seems to work fine --- but you firmware image's RAM requirements have just gone up by 32kB, and a week later there's a crisis when adding another feature causes the system to stop linking because the RAM address space is full. W…
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It's a really annoying widespread opinion. I've been looking for people who really do write OSes in modern C++.
I'm the maintainer of a proprietary C++14 RTOS for work. What do you want to know?
An OS in C++? But Linus said... http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
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BeOS is the reason I learned C++. I don't recall exactly, but either I didn't understand how or there was no other option but C++ if one wanted to hit the BeOS API. Pity Be Inc. got shafted so bad by MS monopoly abuse. They had zero vendors willing to put their OS on a box and resell it because MS threatened the vendors with pulling their right to sell Windows if they did. This wasn't particular to Be, but to any oth…
Yeah, still have my Be CDs stored somewhere. However regarding Microsoft, I actually think that vendors were as guilty as Microsoft. They could have chosen not to take Microsoft's discount and try to sell alternative OSes, even if it meant having to face a few challenges. The one that takes is as guilty as the one that gives.
I did a quick search and came up with Quora answer given here: https://www.quora.com/Why-was-the-BeOS-dropped
but this doesn't jive with my memory. I will have to see if I can find an old email or maybe dig further on the net. I certainly don’t want to be rewriting history.