'Cosmo' — a C#-Based Operating System 406
Billly Gates writes "A new operating system called Cosmo has been developed, written entirely in C#. It shows the naysayers you can write a full OS kernel without C. So far, you need Visual Studio to compile and run it, as Mono is not supported. However, the source code can be compiled with the Express editions of Visual Studio. The project plans to add VB.NET support soon."
open source but (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it dirty? (Score:2, Insightful)
Requiring a Windows environment to compile a OS is like using dirty energy to produce clean energy.
Re:but... (Score:1, Insightful)
does it run Linux?
Ha ha ha. This is why I come back to Slashdot time and time again. Fresh, witty jokes of this caliber.
Re:open source but (Score:3, Insightful)
Still closed. Still proprietary. Still encumbered by patents. Stil useless for the basis of operating system development.
Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is a failure on so many levels. It's about a dead project that sounds pointless in the first place, and they didn't even get the name right in the headline or summary.
It's a trifecta of fail all at once.
Re:And why??? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to the "because I could" spirit of the true hacker?
We have stories of people building CPUs inside of game logic that is in itself running on a virtual machine that runs on top of a hardware abstraction layer that runs inside a kernel that might very well be running under the purview of a hypervisor. What is the point?
There isn't a point other than to wave your hand at the mountain of functional but completely useless triumph and say "I did that; I built that mountain".
If you have to ask why someone would waste their time on something like this, you miss the point of hackerdom. Turn in your badge at the door.
God forbid (Score:5, Insightful)
God forbid anyone just think it's neat for the sake of doing it. No, everyone has to go on an anti-Microsoft rant. Personally, I think it's kinda cool. I'd never use it for anything, but it's still cool that it was done. Instead of shitting on the developers just be happy they did something outside of the norm.
Not as silly as people seem to think (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, the project hasn't gone anywhere for a while, and C# isn't going to be most people's choice for systems programming without a whole lot of changes. But we need to face the fact that C is outdated.
A lot of the basic tradeoffs made in its design are based on assumptions that are no longer true. An example: C's need to have everything declared in the same functional unit before use and reliance on preprocessor #includes. In 1970, saving compiler effort and putting this burden on the programmer rather than having a more complex system for resolving symbols may have been an acceptable tradeoff; with modern machines it's ridiculous. Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
In the past 40 years, a lot of new ideas have emerged which make writing software simpler, faster, and better-organized; some ideas which make code safer or allow the compiler etc to do better optimization have emerged too. Parallelization/multithreading and concurrency have come to the forefront of programming problems, and languages can do better at taking it into account.
All this time, we've been writing almost all our most critical software with the same language K&R designed 40 years ago, or with something like C++ which inherits all its problems and none of its simplicity. Sure, people can point out a handful of examples of OSes built in other high-level programming languages back in the day before C had major uptake. But just about every machine out there today runs on a C-based stack.
The industry needs to find a new direction sometime; we can't procrastinate it forever. Very few people have made serious efforts to replace C at the OS level with something more modern. Even D, which is one of the very few newer languages which really try to be able to replace C, has no major OS effort. We really need to get OS developers and language&compiler designers on the same page, find a better standard for systems programming, and create a platform which isn't dependent on the C legacy. I, for one, am not about to laugh at any project which attempts to undertake this daunting task.