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Comment by arduinomancer | Hacker News Reader

Was curious does Serenity use _any_ external libraries?

For example crypto, font rendering, etc

None in the default OS, it uses existing C++ build tools to build the OS, but the OS itself (inc. Kernel, GUI & default Apps) was built from scratch. Including Font Editor (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...), rendering and Crypto impl (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...).

It does maintain a large number of ports you can install as add-ons to be able to use existing software, tools, languages & games, etc in SerenityOS.

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ports

Wow just browsing the libraries directory is impressive

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

It looks like they default to using recursive mutexes. In my experience those are a recipe for hard to debug deadlocks because if you acquire multiple locks, it's hard to ensure you always acquire them in the same order.

Like anything and everything in Serenity, if you think it could be better, make it so.

there's an old trick for that that works pretty well; always acquire all locks you need in alphabetical (or some sorted) order

The problem is that you can't statically confirm this via static analysis when you use recursive locks. You can only use runtime lock dep analysis to figure out when you might have gotten it wrong. Often you may not acquire locks in the same function, so it's not very intuitive based on control flow to understand whether or not you've acquired them in the wrong order.

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