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Comment by thinkpad20 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know how feasible this is without pretty significant performance impact (esp. memory usage), but as a research project, it sounds fascinating. Go for it.

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> don't really know how feasible this is

And I suspect neither does the author. I looked at the previous project (OpenGL Renderer) which comes in at 250 lines of code and barely any functionality. The current project is has no code at all.

I'm all for sharing ideas, but this is somewhat lacking. The design document touches on the memory model, but ignores all the other problems an OS has to solve (scheduling, networking, disk IO...).

The author is probably not even aware of those problems, and will hit a wall when he realizes his new OS has to deal with one of those issues -- and that's assuming he even gets far enough in his project to deal with scheduling or IO. Writing your first operating system is an especially challenging task even when you're not trying to revolutionize the traditional OS model.

I don't suppose this project will actually go anywhere, though I'd be pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

The author could focus on an existing embedded RTOS and fork from there. Enough cherries to pick one.

But is he going to find one that follows his "all has to be immutable" approach? I somewhat doubt it. Do you know of any existing OS that works like what the author describes?

The reason I posted the idea was to start with a system that is working and where you can forego the filesystem and other parts that are typically found on a full blown OS. It's not uncommon for an RTOS to dismiss the GC and leave it to the programmer.

For example, there are discussions in the RTOS world to take a closer look at Rust (Google embedded Rust) which is why the terms "new OS", "GC" and "experimental" triggered my response to look over there for a starting point.

That is a very good idea. So far I've only been able to figure out EFI booting basics.. Which is the least interesting part. Do you have any concrete suggestions?

My recommendation would be to modify an existing OS, like MINIX, to have two types of processes: mutable and immutable.

That way some (not all) of the potential advantages can be tested without having to start from scratch.

That is very interesting. It would mean a lot less work on mundane things like file systems too. Will investigate.

I also like MINUX's message passing style of interprocess communication.

My thought exactly :)

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