NodeOS: a "hacker-friendly operating" system written in Node.js (opens in new tab)

  "Node is not a perfect language by any means..."

'Node' is not a language by any means.

An OS's main job is managing hardware resources, and either Javascript/Node is too high level, or the abstraction needed to give it access to those resources will come at too high a cost to make this a usable operating system.

I think you mean NodeSH, not OS. I don't see any aspect of this that tells me it's an operating system.

"Node is not a perfect language by any means, but..."

Also, Node is a framework, the language is Javascript.

Very pretty diagrams and logos, but is there any code at all right now? The github repo is empty. https://github.com/NodeOS/NodeOS

Edit: ah, it currently resides inside the Docker-Node repository: https://github.com/NodeOS/Docker-NodeOS

This is actually a Linux distribution.

Yeah, this seems like a shell and not an operating system. I don't want to hate on someone's efforts, but I am failing to see how this will be of benefit for anyone? I could just be missing something, like the mission or vision, also, FWIW-- I hate NPM. I think it is one of the worst I've used... I stopped using Node on persoanl projects because of it (though it has gotten marginally better since I stopped).

If this was to be a shell, I could see it being useful... There are a few similar projects out there. Though I'd suggest a language like Ruby, as I believe it makes for nicer DSLs than Javascript.

As well, I'd be afraid of Google and betting on V8 for long term support, or non-breaking API changes that cause the "OS" to shit the bed.

Sure, because hosting the whole repo on github is going to be a smart move. Call me when there are dependencies issues, new versions that break the whole systems and security issues with unsigned packages.

No, just no.

Why would I use this and not npm on Ubuntu? Mozilla is not going to distribute Firefox using npm and even it it does, why not use npm to install FF on Ubuntu if it really is that great.

I'm just trying to understand the reasoning behind this. What do I gain by using NodeOS instead of a regular linux distribution?

Sounds interesting, and could serve as an alternative to Chrome OS or Firefox OS.

In many ways, it's a throwback to the old days of Lisp machines. Entire OS in a dynamic language, extensible at run-time, etc...

With the many languages that compile to JS (and now Asm.js) this could be huge and very interesting.

Great, more badass rockstar ninja developers using the newly discovered 201x techniques of async coding to disrupt the operating system.

My beef is not that the author is playing around with using an actually pretty awesome dynamic language as an operating environment; it's that the author doesn't explain that what they're doing is actually, you know, an operating system.

How are you booting? How are you writing to the file system--and which? How do you handle multiple users? How do you handle device IO? How about scheduling?

I want so badly to be able to take projects like this seriously, but it can be hard sometimes.

EDIT:

Ah, so, this is just Node sitting on top of Linux ( https://github.com/NodeOS/Docker-NodeOS ). Would've been nice if that was mentioned in the article.

EDIT2:

Hmm...what's the word for it when the OS suspends your program while waiting on IO for it...a sink ro nose? a sink rose? Bah, I can't remember--that's just old boring shit from the dinosaur ages of computing anyways.

Heh. Literally this morning I had to use Node to pipe data from one process to another. Unless there's a drastic increase in the efficiency of the syntax, I'm keeping this at arm's length.

I'd be terrified if this guy had done work for me previously. How exactly is it that someone like this guy ends up being a "Professional Software Engineer"? Has the bar been dropped that low?

How could this project go wrong in any way? It could become popular.