Mu: A Human Scale Computer | Hacker News Reader

Mu: A Human Scale Computer

github.com

59 pointssummarity12 comments

This (HN news/Github project) title is awkward. Apparently, it's all about a new Operating System. However, I don't read much about kernels or shells but instead about assembler and particular features (?) such as "Track side effects in assembly language".

Somehow the project lacks a short README or Abstract or list of goals. It's hard to get an overview without spending much time studying.

Author here. Thanks for the feedback! I seem to have conveyed exactly the wrong impression. Mu is at the moment not an OS but a userland, with some tiny fraction of libc redesigned so that programs tend to be easier to test.

The eventual goal is a complete stack with its own OS, but Mu currently actually relies on a third-party OS kernel. You can package it up with either Linux or Soso (https://github.com/ozkl/soso)

Does this help? Let me think about how to make the prose clearer..

Hey thanks for chiming in. I discovered this on someone's tilde blog. If you can think of a more descriptive title, let me know and I'll update it.

Thanks for the submission! I think I have bigger problems than the title ^_^ According to HN policy there's really not much you could do besides use the title I have.

Could you point me at the tilde blog where you saw it? I'm on the tildeverse as well (https://lists.tildeverse.org/hyperkitty/list/tildeclub@lists...)

Sorry I don't recall. I was in a random webring rabbit hole and don't feel like going through a hundred entries in my history :D. It was just a link though, with no note next to it.

HN policy asks to rewrite misleading titles. Perhaps this one is misleading, to judge by the comments about it? In which case we can change it to something more accurate. We also often take an author's preferred HN title as long as it isn't baity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What happened to the previous Mu that was a funny looking procedural language and why did you decide to switch directions?

It was a tree-walking interpreter and slow. I had to switch it to a form that could be compiled. This took me down a year-long road of learning about machine code.

I would argue that the spirit of Mu has remained constant. Where it needs to change it does so without trying to stay 'compatible' with the past. It tries to present as little change atop the substrate as possible to be habitable (http://akkartik.name/post/habitability)

The old version is available at https://github.com/akkartik/mu1. I'll continue to support it.

http://akkartik.name/about provides more info about the submission.

About half way down, "... I've been exploring some promising mechanisms in my current project, an idealized assembly language and OS for teaching programming called Mu"

Unrelated to Mu, the Simple Python Code Editor, which has been around since 2017 https://codewith.mu/

What's the aim ?

> The hypothesis of Mu and SubX is that designing the entire system to be testable from day 1 and from the ground up would radically impact the culture of the eco-system in a way that no bolted-on tool or service at higher levels can replicate...

Maybe that's the aim.

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