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Comment by BanazirGalbasi | Hacker News Reader

When the original project, MinuetOS, was started, RISC-V didn't exist yet and I don't think ARM was common enough. Even when this was forked from MinuetOS four years later the status quo hadn't really changed. If anything, it was moving more toward x86 because Apple was switching away from Power at the time.

I don't think the lack of portability is much of a hindrance tbh. Portability doesn't seem to have been a goal of the project at all, so I'm not sure why we're judging it on a criteria they don't care about.

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> so I'm not sure why we're judging it on a criteria they don't care about.

It's not judging, but wondering and regretting that architecture independence was not a requirement. Personally, I have started in the late nineties to free my projects from the dependencies (or rather "shackles") of specific platforms and vendors. This has more than paid off. Otherwise, a large part of my many years of work would have been lost.

You're absolutely right to do it. There's one platform that's for all intents and purposes not portable (Windows) that has been extremely successful, but outside of that no one has survived by being wedded to only one architecture.

I guess its a lesson for all those companies on ARM: always have a plan B.

Well, at least there are many independent chip providers, and that they use the same ARM architecture (i.e. detail design specifications, etc.) even has the advantage that tools and know-how are re-useable by the companies using these chips (and that each of these chip providers has the ARM detail design at hand is even an advantage compared to RISC-V, where "only" the ABI is open source); in contrast MS is indeed a single provider keeping the source code of most of its products closed (which virtually makes it a potential "single point of failure" for a large market).

Both Windows NT kernel API and Windows userspace API are designed to be portable across processor architectures, minus a few non-essential assumptions that are sadly assumed to be invariants by some userspace applications.

There are different philosophies regarding software development. The project as it seems follows Chuck Moore's idea which says one must re-write more often (vs abstract away, patch over, extend above etc.), and be more focused on particular usages (vs betting on hypothetical future cases) to keep software unbloated, quick, and truly navigable by developers. Apparently, this approach is far from being popular (majority of devs probably doesn't even know such thing exists) because programmer's time has been very expensive for decades. So code quality, speed, and especially size became much lesser concern compared to time spent. But people do practice it as an art form in non-commercial projects, and to enhance their skills in optimization. Writing a whole OS with GUI, and apps in FASM apparently is one of such exercises.

You can (and in some cases should) also rewrite and simplify code written in a plattform independent high-level language. And even Forth has re-usable parts not written in assembler (though re-use and generality aren't Chuck's thing).

Trying it out in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios , it's also clearly a love letter to Windows 95 in particular. That could be an unstated goal here, create a very particular PC experience under very particular constraints.

I don't know anything about the creator but it's very possible that this kind of work was actually their career in the 90s. Most of the people who built those experiences are still around today, and not all of them have the visibility of Dave's Garage.

It's incredible how much work was done. Maybe this should be an internet curiosity like how TempleOS has become, though Terry's personality was a unique factor.

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