Comment by mntmn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mntmn | Hacker News Reader

Interim author here. Surprised to see this reappear. I'm a bit embarrassed by the code quality nowadays, but I still like the concept and as critics here have correctly pointed out, there ought to be a lot less C in it.

Back then I was struggling very hard to get the low level details of the machine under control (Pi back then and some experiments with x86 BIOS stuff). It was super fun to have this ham-fisted brutalist JIT actually do something real and to connect to IRC on this mockery of a TCP stack and to make some VC4 GL triangles appear out of a bunch of commandstream arrays.

In the meantime I've built an FPGA graphics card for Amiga (VA2000) and an open laptop, the MNT Reform, whose beta units will ship very soon now (TM). A while ago I also worked with some really smart software engineers as a startup CTO for 1.5 years and all of these things together have given me a lot more perspective and depth compared to back then.

It will be fun to return to this and clean it up as a demo for Reform.

The fact that you are embarassed is a sure sign that you have grown tremendously as an engineer. Kudos for working on such interesting things.

This is a stellar comment, I've always found that a person's level of (dis)comfort with their past work is a great judge of how willing they are to learn and improve.

Whoa. That MNT Reform looks absolutely sick!! It's basically my dream machine. I periodically look around for exactly this kind of thing and can't believe I've not stumbled upon it before.

Need to start saving up now for when it goes live. Hopefully, my puny student wages can handle the cost.

Anyway, just wanted to express my enthusiasm for your project!!

> I've built an FPGA graphics card for Amiga (VA2000)

That sounds pretty interesting! Every so often I think about the things I don’t enjoy when using computers and how I’d solve it (I’ve played around with hobbyist kernel/is development on occasion too, including contributing to Daeken’s RenrakuOS ten years ago..) but my motivation always drains when I think about how it would never be realistic to get hardware accelerated graphics working. Just the other day I was thinking that maybe my best bet is a minimal Linux system that boots into a full screen OpenGL application that basically pretends to be my OS. I even thought about doing it on a RPi3 since I have a few of them sitting around and it seems like a nice self-contained, expandable and cheap hardware platform to build on. Your projects sound like some of the things I’ve dreamed about but never actually did. :)

Didn't expect to see RenrakuOS mentioned in this thread -- hey man! I actually started playing around with some ideas for a modern follow-up recently, stealing a lot of concepts from Redox. Maybe once it gets off the ground, I can rope you into working on that OS too, haha. (For those who are curious, RenrakuOS was a pure-managed (.NET) operating system from the late 2000s: https://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS It could run on top of a desktop .NET framework, or compile to native code and run bare metal, even including some basic networking support and such. Ended up dying mostly due to me getting too busy with startup stuff, but also it had a lot of poor design decisions, e.g. a broken process abstraction.)

That's cool! Do you know how RenrakuOS compares to Singularity and Midori? (IIRC they were also managed and ran .NET stuff)

Renraku was very heavily inspired by Singularity. They went with more of the formal verification approach, which I thought was unnecessary for a desktop OS (which is what I was building). Also, I went 100% pure-managed, where Singularity has some hand-written assembly and C.

Cool! Put your new project on GitHub ;-) What is it written in?

Hey, does MNT Reform run coreboot?

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