Hacker News Reader

Comment by eck | Hacker News Reader

I know the author is a long-hellbanned hn user, possibly with some kind of mental illness.

But just out of curiosity, I downloaded the 24MB ISO from the website and loaded it up in a VMWare instance. It does boot...

It's an odd curses-like interface, with lots of blinking and scrolling. There are command-line looking things around, but all of the commands are kind of like C statements, like instead of 'cd ..' you have to do 'Cd("..");'. Really odd. There's a blue box that pops up possible completions, but it seems to have a whole dictionary in addition to commands.

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...

View on HN

The entire OS is written in a language called C+ (now renamed to Holy C), it is an very interesting language in that it is just in time compiled. It's a mix between old school C and C++, taking some good/bad from both.

The language is fully documented too, see http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Doc/HolyC.html.

The entire OS runs in a single memory space, so processes communicating with each other is as simple as writing to that processes memory space and telling to go execute.

All of the .z files you find in the source tree directories are a gzip like algorithm that on the fly in the OS automatically unzips them, and then compiles the code contained within.

The interesting thing is that while the programs are generally just in time compiled, the main startup programs can't be, however you can easily change the OS and re-run the compiler, overwrite the already started OS and continue on. The compiler CAN write binaries but it is not recommended by the author.

And I may have spent entirely too much time in this ;-).

The author may be a schizophrenic, what he has built is kinda neat.

Play with it if you have VMWare and you're bored, but I'd strongly recommend fully isolating it...

He's said that networking isn't a goal of the project, as the OS is intended for gaming. So it doesn't have any way to connect to any network.

Isolation is not just about networking.

Hmm.. What else is it about? Using VMware or Virtualbox is actually more dangerous from an isolation perspective because of shared folders and sharing USB drives between the guest/host OS.

Isolation is meant w.r.t. the concept of resources. Resources include, but are not limited to, network and file system access. Other resources, from which you might want to isolate processes, are other processes (or even just PIDs), CPU cycles, and memory. Isolation is also about limiting the impact of an exploit.

> possibly with some kind of mental illness

Oh, that explains very well what I was thinking about those bible cites..

I think he posted an explanation for those seemingly gibberish posts. He wrote a program to grab random text from the Bible and other sources. Supposedly that randomness is what allows the truth to come out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com