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NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js

nodeos.github.io

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Re: NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js

#4
Sounds interesting, and could serve as an alternative to Chrome OS or Firefox OS.

In many ways, it's a throwback to the old days of Lisp machines. Entire OS in a dynamic language, extensible at run-time, etc...

With the many languages that compile to JS (and now Asm.js) this could be huge and very interesting.

Re: NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js

#6

  "Node is not a perfect language by any means..."
'Node' is not a language by any means.

An OS's main job is managing hardware resources, and either Javascript/Node is too high level, or the abstraction needed to give it access to those resources will come at too high a cost to make this a usable operating system.

Re: NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js

#7
post #4

Sounds interesting, and could serve as an alternative to Chrome OS or Firefox OS. In many ways, it's a throwback to the old days of Lisp machines. Entire OS in a dynamic language, extensible at run-time, etc... With the many languages that compile to JS (and now Asm.js) this could be huge and very interesting.

As far as I'm aware, the Chrome and Firefox parts of the respective OSes run in userland, and not that close to the kernel, whereas the diagram on GitHub for this suggests the kernel and Node would be much closer. I could be wrong about this though, it's vague.

Re: NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js

#10
Great, more badass rockstar ninja developers using the newly discovered 201x techniques of async coding to disrupt the operating system.

My beef is not that the author is playing around with using an actually pretty awesome dynamic language as an operating environment; it's that the author doesn't explain that what they're doing is actually, you know, an operating system.

How are you booting? How are you writing to the file system--and which? How do you handle multiple users? How do you handle device IO? How about scheduling?

I want so badly to be able to take projects like this seriously, but it can be hard sometimes.

EDIT:

Ah, so, this is just Node sitting on top of Linux ( https://github.com/NodeOS/Docker-NodeOS ). Would've been nice if that was mentioned in the article.

EDIT2:

Hmm...what's the word for it when the OS suspends your program while waiting on IO for it...a sink ro nose? a sink rose? Bah, I can't remember--that's just old boring shit from the dinosaur ages of computing anyways.

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