the triad:
want to write an operating system
don't want to write C
don't know any systems language with full dynamic linking support except C
@alilly Does FreePascal support what you need?
@wizzwizz4 I don't really know Pascal, so I don't know if it compares favorably to C… but I worry it will share many of the same footguns.
@alilly To my knowledge, FreePascal has all the same footguns as GCC C, except viral Undefined Behaviour. (The optimisation philosophy is quite different: it doesn't seem to transform code into "equivalent code" in the same way, but often produces smaller binaries despite that.)
You could write your own language, and use that to write your operating system.
@wizzwizz4 don't tempt me
@alilly Existing languages aren't suitable. You know it, I know it. If we want to do OS dev (which I do), we need something better.
(Happy to collaborate if you don't want to make a new language on your own.)
@wizzwizz4 @alilly If we're talking about a new language, & new OS... Tempts me to ask...
(I think you 2 know me!)
@alcinnz @wizzwizz4 what would a modern Lisp OS look like…
I am too tempted
@alilly @alcinnz @wizzwizz4 for ideas, you may want to read this paper: http://metamodular.com/lispos.pdf
@loke @alcinnz @wizzwizz4 I haven't yet finished it but I do have some thoughts. The high-level design goals are similar to what I think mine would be (single-level store, objects instead of files, no processes), though I am considerably put off by the proposed strategy for crash resistance, which seems to be "don't have bugs."
@loke @alcinnz @wizzwizz4 Hm. :/ It has one of those middle-of-the-road "what if both capabilities /and/ ACLs!" access control systems. Plus it casually assumes all the object store metadata will fit in main memory and that it will be acceptably performant to test every entry against a user-provided filter function, /mentioning/ indexes without explaining how this approach would be able to use them. The two alternate checkpointing mechanisms discussed are both very wasteful of both space and time.
And then there's this sentence:
Experiments show that we will be able to run the thread-local garbage collector in a few milliseconds, which is good enough for most applications.
I don't think the author of this paper was thinking very carefully about the parts that didn't directly interest them.
It does appear to independently reinvent promises though (calling them "tickets").