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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID
	autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,76da32d8c4934801
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>
Subject: Re: Ada --> C Translation, was: Win CE target
Date: 1998/10/14
Message-ID: <m33e8r44ei.fsf@fred.muc.de>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 400989302
Distribution: world
Sender: andi@fred.muc.de
References: <wcck92nbxdh.fsf@world.std.com> <6vobnk$vt9$1@jupiter.cs.uml.edu>
 <dale-1110980932270001@dale.ppp.cs.rmit.edu.au>
 <6vp23h$hc3$1@jupiter.cs.uml.edu> <6vtams$gir$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
 <700r76$66c$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com>
Organization: [posted via] Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, Muenchen (Germany)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1998-10-14T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

dewarr@my-dejanews.com writes:

> In article <6vp23h$hc3$1@jupiter.cs.uml.edu>,
>   dramirez@cs.uml.edu (Dr Amirez) wrote:
> 
> > Linux is (used to be anyway ) a one man project. Surely an OS can't be that
> > hard to build. Please leave AT&T out of this. They contribute greatly
> 
> That's a completely absurd characterization of Linux. The existence of Linux
> is the culmination of the work of many people working on many things. Yes,
> most certainly the kernel that Linus originally wrote was a critical
> component, but an OS is much more than a kernel, and the work of hundreds of
> people, perhaps thousands has gone into creating the operating system that we
> know as Linux. In particular, the GNU project provided a large set of
> critical components, including most importantly the compilers that made the
> project possible, as well as many other important utilities.

Also the Linux kernel is definitely not a one-man project, although it has a
chief architect (Linus Torvalds). It consists of lots of separated
subsystems (kernel core, networking, file systems, isdn, drivers, scsi,
console code, tty subsystem, ...) and has also separated architecture
specific code sections.  All these have their own maintainers or groups of
maintainers with only minor overlap. The largest part of Linux are the
drivers which have all their own maintainer.

Then there are of course lots of other important parts of the systems
which are developed by other people, like XFree86 or the C Library. 

To get back on the topic. Simple OS without advanced features like
networking or virtual memory are not that difficult to build. For an 
example see UCOS. Another smaller OS available in source is vsta (it has
virtual memory and networking, but it still much simpler than Linux) 

These are writen in C, but they probably could be writen in Ada as well. 

-Andi