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Comment by headcanon | Hacker News Reader

A lot of criticism for not being a "real" OS from a technical perspective - by "OS" the author likely means this is a graphical windowing system and application platform - the part of the OS that the user sees and interacts with. That it is written in nodejs is irrelevant - if this gains traction it would likely be rewritten and optimized for better efficiency.

Also bear in mind this is a single university students design project, he's not trying to be Linus or stallman just yet - Id love to see more people trying to rethink the desktop/workstation OS.

To the author - well done, this is far more than I would have been able to do in uni!

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If it isn't an operating system, it shouldn't be called an operating system.

He isn't trying to rethink the desktop/workstation OS. If he's found a way of improving upon existing desktop environments, it should be clear what improvements he's made and how he has made them.

It seems it's written in Node Webkit (NW.js), which - if I understand correctly - allows you to build desktop applications in the same way node.js allows you to build applications which run in the browser. He appears to have used this to prototype a desktop environment. Rewriting a desktop environment, for efficiency, in C and using Xlib would itself be a major undertaking.

If things keep going the way they are someday JavaScript is gonna be optimized enough to get pretty close to C; specially functional scripts/parts (those with no side effects).

Right sure, then you'll have something that (supposedly) goes as fast as C and has even more issues! This is going to be great!

Close to C for perf, in some things.

Very, very far from C in memory, for all things.

https://asmjs.org/

It's a statically typed subset of JS that uses typed arrays for machine-typed memory and JS's bitwise operators for int32 and uint32 casts, and + for to-IEEE754-double, etc.

It is as fast as memory-safe C-like variants already, see

https://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=as...

I'm not sure why the native C++ (clang) gray line stops over a year ago. Perhaps @azakai can say.

> Id love to see more people trying to rethink the desktop/workstation OS

He's very creative. Both his video[0] and website are very artistic. I originally went through the initial reddit links[1] to try and figure out what he was trying to do here.

He just needs to provide more substance. Lots of flash but little info. I say this as constructive criticism. It shouldn't have taken me as long as it did to figure out what this was.

On a positive note: I did spend extra time trying to figure it out because it looks so great and I really liked that he went JS-stack with this - it's very impressive. Impressive enough that it's on my todo list (very few things get on it because I've gotten very lazy!:)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5tak0tHqIg

[1] https://www.reddit.com/user/anesuc/submitted/

> A lot of criticism for not being a "real" OS from a technical perspective

It's not criticism, an actual full operating system written in NW.js would just be very special in its own way.

NW.js requires an underlying operating system to function, so if it really could be called an "NW.js-based operating system", there would have to be interesting things like bootstrapping WebKit as early as possible and then doing everything else in there.

And that would also have stark performance implications. If core-libraries were written in NW.js, getting something as fluid as in the videos, would be absolutely incredible.

That would still not be an operating system. It would still just be a very early on bootstrapped WebKit in a different operating system.

When I was in university, I knew what the difference between an operating system and desktop environments were, I knew what click-bait nonsense was ("An OS! In JS!") and I knew what JS was good for (web) and what it was terrible for (everything else).

> if this gains traction it would likely be rewritten and optimized for better efficiency

Uttered by any JS "mvp" apologist ever; number of times fulfilled in JS projects: 0.2 times. (The .2 goes for Atom and its C++ rewrites).

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