bloovis

One thing that sticks in my mind was that the system call API was well-designed (by Frank Holsworth). Everything involved getting or setting tables (structures). The documentation for this was really quite good.

That's interesting. I left DRI just before Novell bought it, and wasn't aware of anybody besides IBM using it.

I worked at Digital Research from 1984 to 1990. CP/M-68K was the first operating system I used there, but only for a brief period. It's unfortunate that the source for FlexOS is not available; it would be a better choice for a hobby project like this. It was a protected mode OS for the 286 that had a real-time kernel, TCP/IP stack, DOS compatibility box, and more. It was a clean break from CP/M. IBM used it in their point-of-sale terminals for quite a few years, and I worked on porting it to 32-bit architectures like the NEC V60. It died after Novell bought DRI, aside from its use inside IBM.

> Why do you need to run the browser on the server? I can't think of a case where you would want to use a text browser there instead of a regular browser on your actual machine.

I've had to do that on my VPS a few times when I was debugging my Apache setup and needed to look at a web page that was only visible on the VPS, i.e., not available to the outside world.

Crystal compiles directly to object code, using LLVM. It does provide the ability to interoperate with C code; as an example, I use this feature to call ncursesw functions from Crystal.

As others have mentioned, Crystal is close to Ruby in many ways, such that some simpler code will port straight over. I've managed to port a large Ruby application (the sup email client) to Crystal, and a lot of the code just worked, but I still had tweak just about everything else to get it to compile. The hardest bits were the places that used Ruby's dynamic nature, e.g., constructing method names at runtime and then calling them with send, or creating methods on the fly, or data structures that mixed up types freely.

Crystal's intent, as I see it, is very different from Ruby's. Because it compiles down to machine code in a single executable, it's good for making things that are fast and easy to deploy. I've used it to make small web services as well as the bigger thing I mentioned above.

My ex-wife had the same name as a woman in another state who had beaten up a cop and done jail time. So every time my wife's driver's license came up for renewal, the DMV decided she was that criminal, and refused to issue the license. This happened so often, she eventually was on a first-name basis with the DMV director, who had to intervene every time. I'm guessing this problem due to the DMV in our little state using an ancient computer system, perhaps written in COBOL in the 1960s. I can just see the code now, where it compares the name, but not state of residence or any other identifiers.