Re: Writing an Operating System in Ada

[Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>]

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010, Leslie wrote:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Shark8 wrote:                                                         |
|                                                                       |
|> I was wondering if there would be any interest in coding up an       |
|> OS in Ada. I don't mean taking an existing codebase and              |
|> rewriting/converting it to Ada, but implementing it from the         |
|> ground up. It's been a bit of a "for later" project for me to        |
|> write an OS, although I did begin to write one in Turbo Pascal       |
|> which got to the point of being able to recognize user-commands      |
|> & (based on those commands) change the screen resolution. {And       |
|> all using less than ten lines of inline assembly!}                   |
|>                                                                      |
|> As time went on the project went on the back-burner and "later"      |
|> never really came around, but in that meantime I was finishing       |
|> up my degree in CS and came across Ada in my senior-level            |
|> programming languages class. The design of Ada impressed me a        |
|> lot and so I got myself Barnes's Ada 2005 book and started           |
|> teaching myself. (So, in reality I'm pretty new to Ada, but I        |
|> do come from a Pascal background and like the idea of having my      |
|> compiler check things for correctness.)                              |
|>                                                                      |
|> Anyway, I was wondering if anybody here would be interested in       |
|> such a project.                                                      |
|        Interestingly, I was just thinking last week while reading John|
|Barnes' /Programming in Ada 2005/ that Ada would be a fine             |
|language to user for writing an OS.  I'm not yet proficient in         |
|Ada, but would be interested in contributing what I can.               |
|                                                                       |
|Leslie"                                                                |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

If the two of you are willing to implement an operating system in Ada
then proceed and succeed! I wish you well. However, every few months
or years hobbyists' projects for volunteers to develop an operating
system in Ada not aimed at embedded targets have been proposed on this
newsgroup without ever amounting to anything.

Regards,
Colin Paul Gloster