From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Shark8 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Writing an Operating System in Ada Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:37:11 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <8e9bc311-7540-40a1-b19e-49e93648c25c@s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 75.161.19.107 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1263317831 6576 127.0.0.1 (12 Jan 2010 17:37:11 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:37:11 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: s31g2000yqs.googlegroups.com; posting-host=75.161.19.107; posting-account=lJ3JNwoAAAAQfH3VV9vttJLkThaxtTfC User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.6) Gecko/20091201 Firefox/3.5.6 (.NET CLR 4.0.20506),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:8708 Date: 2010-01-12T09:37:11-08:00 List-Id: On Jan 12, 2:41=A0am, "Dmitry A. Kazakov" 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.} 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.