Re: Writing an Operating System in Ada

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

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>

Now the idea that everything [system-wise] is an object is much more
appealing to me. Objects are a very natural way to [generically] model
hardware: a display has a running-resolution, available resolutions,
OpenGL/DirectX compatibility, etc. It could even be engineered in such
a way that every device-object 'knows' how to write code for its
device and that code is JIT-compiled for the specific system.
(Example: A PCI-card can be inserted unto a system-board with a SPARC
processor, or one with an AMD processor, the two different endian-ness
but the card is the same for both, so it stands to reason that a
device-object [device-driver] could be written in a high-level manner
abstracting out the low-level... probably by having the aforementioned
JIT which is linked to the CPU's device-object tell that object to
output the codes for the PCI-card-object.)

Having such a system means that we could support disparate
architectures by having base-CPU objects & the high-level driver-
objects on a bootable CD with a VM such as DOTNET or JVM and
'installing the OS' would be compiling it for that HW-setup. The
downside to how I'm describing it is that it sounds a little too Unix-
y.

Using the Java-style interfaces we could have a file-system interface
which would allow the OS to use any FS which was implemented in an
object using said interface.