Renraku OS: The Way Up | Hacker News Reader

Renraku OS: The Way Up

daeken.com

33 pointsdaeken11 comments

Hi. I'm not familiar with Renraku OS and just read the "Renraku: Future OS" post. It seems to me to be a mix of Singularity, Unununium and the TUNES project.

I have thought about a similar system before: install-time verified (and native compiled) managed code, which is guaranteed to only run within its environment, so no need to separate processes into their own address spaces, object store instead of filesystem, orthogonal persistence, network transparent communications channels (in fact, IMO everything should go over some sort of communications channel which can be "rewired" or redirected. Like piping in unix command line, only global, for all apps, GUI or CLI).

Anyway, interesting project!

Yea, it's a mix of several other projects. I've been accumulating ideas from all kinds of sources for years, and I've ended up with the list you see in the Future OS post (among others). One thing I'd like to note is that the interaction between objects, even just plain method calls, can really be seen as a communication channel and made network transparent very easily. I'd really like to get basic networking and network transparency into Renraku by year's end, but we'll see.

As long as I can, somehow, redirect the communication to other programs, I'm happy. I'll give you an example: if I have a text editor that I really really like, lets say notepad.exe for arguments sake, then I should be able to use this for all my text input. It should go further than this though: if I'm talking to you over pidgin, not only should I (somehow) be able to use notepad.exe, but I should also be able to redirect your responses to, for example, another pidgin conversations input, or a text-to-speech device or anywhere really.

The idea is that all input and output can be redirected, filtered, scripted etc. I posted a blog post about some of these ideas once, but I'm not gonna post a link :-D been meaning to clean it up for ages, so maybe after I finally get to doing so, I'll share, heh.

http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os

(So others don't have to go hunting for it like I did.)

Good point, I should have linked it.

No problem - I actually searched for it on my own when I wanted to answer the question "What's the point of this OS? Why is it different?" I came to the comments to post the link to it, and thankfully you already given a summary.

I just want to thank everyone here for your support over the past month or so. The feedback on the previous Renraku posts has been greatly appreciated.

The speed at which these guys are moving is amazing. Probably because they use Boo?

Nice work :)

Thanks for the kind words.

It has a lot to do with Boo, really, particularly in the compiler. The rest of the OS is fairly similar to what you'd see in other .NET languages (although that has a lot to do with our reflectionless runtime not supporting a lot of the cool Boo functionality yet), but in the compiler the Boo list functionality has made life incredibly easy. The internals of the compiler really look a lot like that of a Lisp implementation; the code is loaded from .NET assembles into S-expression like lists, then transformed repeatedly until it becomes machine code.

No way this could've been done so cleanly in most other .NET languages; my previous .NET compilers can attest to that.

Renraku really, really needs a summary Wikipedia page...

Very Nice

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