A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system (opens in new tab)

Just to clarify: are you active/a mod in that channel? Now I’m curious how the GP got the idea you own it.

That makes sense. I misinterpreted that point. That is indeed an important feature and one that's easy to take for granted. Cheers.

How is this different than regular "dynamic linking" where ld-linux.so resolves symbols and loads the shared objects?

Just curious how hard it would be to forego POSIX entirely if you were building an OS. I know TempleOS is entirely from scratch. I'd like to implement a small LISP like SectorLISP [1] (see yesterday's posts too on HN). I don't know much about building my own OS, so I'd like to start with something like MenuetOS (my first PL was asm), SerenityOS, TempleOS, or this one. I'd like it to be completely an 'island', i.e. POSIX not a requirement. I want to use it to hack on in isolation without any easy copy/paste shortcuts. I know Mezzano exists, and it has booted on bare metal, but I would like to start with the OS's above, implement my own LISP, and go from there.

Any other OS recommendations base on my ignorant, but wishful, reqs above? I realize there are some others in Rust too. Thanks!

[1] https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp

> microkernels aren't necessarily better than hybrid, they're slower, harder to debug and process management can be complicated

I was basically on board, but how are they harder to debug? I'd think being able to run components in userspace would make debugging way easier.

I'm very confused by this comment. There are a ton of other things you need to implement if you want to have desktop applications. POSIX does not specify any APIs for graphical applications. You might be thinking of something else.

If you want to support the lion's share of desktop applications, it would actually be better to implement the Win32 API...

Isn't QNX a microkernel? I remember it being known for being quite fast?

True, and as another commenter hinted at, you're free to do your own hobby project however you please, there's not a wrong way to do so if you find it fulfilling.

But at the same time, it does make me sad that most hobby OSes end up seeking POSIX compatibility, because that means being destined to essentially either be another unix-variant or develop a unix-variant inside some subsystem of your OS.

Yes, being unix-like means you gain access to a trove of software and libraries that makes porting applications much easier, but it also limits the potential be truly different and experiment, as your end result will look like "yet another unix" with misc. improvements.

Since I think the enjoyment of building something like this comes from the satisfaction of building an OS from the ground up, I don't think it matters, but it would be cool to see more hobby OSes try more exotic ideas and runtimes.

For *nix maybe, but there are many other non-POSIX operating systems in use today.

So, a preliminary problem for many OS-from-scratch projects intending to create "New Different Great OS" will be to have a language implementation which does not expect posix.

It depends on the goal. If you want to compile pre-existing software for it, or if you want to really "start anew".

That his advantage. He doesn't want to, rather write everything anew from scratch.

Also signals. With a microkernel you won't need signals

At least he didn't write it in node.js /s

Other interesting alternatives to c or rust might be vlang or zig.