Cosmos - OS Written in C# | Hacker News Reader

Cosmos - OS Written in C#

gocosmos.org

50 pointsJarred20 comments

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In related news, Microsoft actually built an OS years ago based on .net technology called Singularity.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/

And there are rumours that they are now working on a new commercial OS codenamed midori, possibly based on Singularity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

Not Opened Sourced though, which is something I would prefer and am very interested in.

I played with this OS, but didn't do too much with it. I remember reading a paper about it though. The author ported ext2 to Singularity. If I can find a working link, I'll post it.

From the Technical FAQ:

  How do I write to a file in COMOS
    You can't, yet.

  What doesn't work
    Interfaces (In the programing sense, not the graphical sense)
    Foreach - Requires interfaces, so use for instead for now

On a brighter note -- from FAQ:

  What is the Project Vision?
    We would like to design Cosmos as:
    (...)
      *The LINUX of tomorrow.

This project made a lot more sense to me after reading this introductory article: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/CosmosUnderHood.aspx

In short, it's a way to develop operating systems, rather than being a particular operating system.

The main page states that the compiler IL2CPU compiles IL to x86 code utilizing NASM. So IL2CPU translates c# code into x86 assembler? Why not translate c# code into C and then use gcc (rather than nasm) to build native binaries? That way you get support for x64, arm, ppc, etc.

Also lots of confusing answers:

Can I use Delphi.NET? Maybe. Unfortunately the Delphi libraries for full of P/Invokes. If you only use the .NET libraries, and use the .NET 2.0 version it might work. Alternatively, you could use Chrome.

Are they talking about Chrome, the browser here? ??

Also why do you need the non free version of Visual Studio? "To further the features of Cosmos development we rely on extending Visual Studio" Why??

I believe they stated it's an OS entirely in C#, therefore having it compile to C would contradict their whole vision. As for your other questions, C# is kind of a mess, with all the different .NET versions and Silverlight. I really enjoy using C# and I'm looking forward to what this project comes to be.

Trying to make a point is fine and all, but turning C# into essentially a compiled language in leu of a more practical approach seems silly.

It seems like instead of using C as an intermediate stage they've basically C-ified C#.

Chrome was the previous name of Oxygene, a .net language derived from pascal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygene_(programming_language)

The browser kinda stole the thunder from their name.

Also... renrakuOS https://github.com/daeken/RenrakuOS

I there the guys behind this are smart. But I also think they have lot going on. The project seems to move slowly. Interesting ideas tho.

I think http://www.mosa-project.org/ is slightly more active.

404 on the screenshots.

I had to remove the Old/ directory name from URLs.

http://www.gocosmos.org/Screenshots/gfx/guess.JPG

Screenshots please?

Operating systems are only written in one language, machine language. Everything else is done in the compiler.

This is an old project... and even Microsoft is now using HTML5 for Metro UI in Windows 8... what happened to WPF? Ask Windows 8: Lack of perfomance!. I can't imagine how useless this operating system would be. What's next, a kernel based in Javascript?

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