Re: Writing an Operating System in Ada

[Martin <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>]

On Jan 13, 3:38 am, Leslie <jlturr...@centurytel.net> wrote:
> Shark8 wrote:
> > On Jan 12, 2:41 am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
> > <mail...@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:
> >> On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:13:55 -0800 (PST), Shark8 wrote:
> >> > Anyway, I was wondering if anybody here would be interested
> >> > in such a project.
>
> >> If that will be a really new OS (not a UNIX clone), OO,
> >> portable, distributed etc, for interesting platforms like
> >> this:
>
> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/08/scalable_open_source_computi...
>
>
>
>
>
> >> why not?
>
> >> --
> >> Regards,
> >> Dmitry A. Kazakovhttp://www.dmitry-kazakov.de
>
> > You know that was a frustrating / discouraging thing to hear
> > almost everybody I talked to about wanting to write an OS say
> > something along the lines of "Why don't you just download the
> > sourcecode for Linux?"... I'm sorry folks, but I don't want to
> > be the OS equivalent of a 'script-kiddie'.
>
> > One thing I find very annoying about the Unix/Linux mentality
> > is the "everything is a file" philosophy... coupled with the
> > C/C++-ism of simply assuming that a file read/write went well
> > and you're asking for trouble. {Yes, I know that you CAN check
> > to see if writing is successful or not in C/C++, but it goes
> > against most C/C++ programmer's sense of terseness/'beauty'...
> > the same one that makes no check on array-bounds.} </Rant>
>
>         If possible, also, it would be nice to get away from the "root
> can do anything" paradigm, and its associated inherited
> privileges (crash a root-capable process and steal its
> privileges).  It would be nice to see something more like the
> explicit privilege design used by CP in IBM's VM operating
> systems.
>         As a side note, does anyone here remember the Intel iAPX432
> processor, designed to execute Ada programs (almost) directly?
>
> Leslie

Nope...but I wish we'd gone for the Ericsson D80A processor (with Ada
(83) runtime in firmware) and not the Motorola 68040! We'd used the
D80 and the D80E which were fantastic processors, not sure why the
decision went the way it did...great support from Ericsson back then
too...

Cheers
-- Martin