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Comment by amyjess | Hacker News Reader

Next step: Python as an operating system. Like Chrome OS or Firefox OS, just with Python instead of a web engine. I'm a big enough Python fan that the idea really intrigues me.

(also, everytime I see an LWN article here, I keep meaning to subscribe, but I mostly read HN at work, and I usually forget by the time I get home... I feel really bad about that)

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> (also, everytime I see an LWN article here, I keep meaning to subscribe, but I mostly read HN at work, and I usually forget by the time I get home... I feel really bad about that)

If you work anywhere even remotely related to Open Source, I'd recommend getting your employer to get a corporate subscription. It's one of the single most valuable news sources I read; it summarizes LKML and numerous other first-hand sources, as well as many conferences, summits, and other in-person events.

Lisp Machines, except in 2015. The beautiful phoenix returns.

Site's down now, but: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-announce-list/2004-...

Anyone want to take a stab at running it in QEMU?

http://uuu.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/uuu/

Edit: http://dl.sourceforge.net/project/uuu/Existence/2003-09-21/e... should boot with qemu-system-i386

That would be interesting. This isn't quite freestanding Python, in that it's running on Grub so there is a lower layer, but it's still cool despite that.

Well, even Chrome OS and Firefox OS don't have their own kernels; they run on top of Linux.

If you were to build a Python OS, you'd probably start by writing PID 1 in Python. It would be a Python init, starting services written in Python, running gettys written in Python, and you'd log into a shell written in Python.

Hmm... I can actually see myself writing an init system in Python... (hell, I did exactly that at my last company.... I'd have to rewrite it from scratch, but that's no big deal...)

Great, I think I've found a new rabbit hole.

Message me if you start this!

https://github.com/justincormack/ljsyscall is just that, but for Lua.

FFI to the kernel on Linux, NetBSD Rump kernels and even bare on Xen.

I wonder how much tweaking supervisord[1] would need to be suitable as a init replacement/for running as PID 1?

Incidentally, I also came across [2] -- which I wasn't aware of.

[1] http://supervisord.org/

[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3143/ https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-daemon

Every OS ever had a bootloader of some sort as far as I'm aware, in some cases you had to toggle them in through the front panel but I don't know of any OS that did not have a bootstrapping stage prepended.

The bootloader normally hands over the OS once it starts however, it doesn't continue running and acting as an interface to the hardware.

There's the bootloader, there's the bios and there is the operating system. It's perfectly legal to do bios calls from a running operating system (though there will be a price to pay for sure). The bootloader is usually discarded after the boot. The bios doesn't 'run' in any way either until you call it, think of it as a library that you can call.

Really would have to do something about the GIL in that case unless you want to be restricted to one core - or run several independent interpreters NUMA-style.

Yeah, the GIL is the biggest reason we haven't tried to run any Python code on non-boot CPUs; we just run tiny C functions that return information to the boot CPU.

Or a web engine made in Python.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava

> I usually forget by the time I get home

Send yourself email reminders.

I really like Wunderlist. In the past few months, they seem to have fixed their syncing issues, so mobile and desktop are pretty seamless now. I keep tons of ideas in Wunderlist, and the search works pretty well if I just brain-dump some keywords into the todo item.

I also made a thing to suck all the Github repos you star into Wunderlist with their descriptions, since I always want to find something I starred in the past, and I've found Github's search lacking in this regard: https://github.com/ip2k/wunder-star

Or just use "at"[1] and "mail" (assuming you have access to a computer that is connected and on after you leave for work):

    $ at 8pm <<END
    > echo "Don't forget to subscribe to lwn!" \
    >   | mail -s "LWN reminder" personal-mail@example.com
    > END

[1] http://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.task-scheduli...

Next step: Python on bare metal ARM targets. Imagine loading Python interpreter to an uC, quickly hacking together some scripts and happily running some DIY project. `sys` and especially `os` packages are out, maybe some high level features and something clever has to be done about interrupts, but that would be totally awesome

That is already available: https://micropython.org I have the PyBoard but one can get it running on ST Discovery boards as well.

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