Re: Writing an Operating System in Ada

[Leslie <jlturriff@centurytel.net>]

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