[Mono-dev] [Mono-devel-list] Operating System in C# Project

[Suresh Shukla]

Hi,
  
  I later found a reference to "D language". It has most of the features  I liked in Java/C#. Its compilers are already available. This language  is more suitable to my purposes of (re)writing a more  readable/modifiable Minix and system programming.
  
  Suresh

Miguel de Icaza <miguel at ximian.com> wrote:  Hello,

> I've seen a Singularity presentation at MIT, and it seems to me that they're
> placing a lot of focus on static verification -- when they talked to us,
> they were trying to make driver contracts, so that drivers can be verifiable
> too. I think that's taking it a bit too far... and this means there's room
> for another C#-based OS.

Singularity is a research project with a specific goal in mind;   Like
you say, there is room for other operating systems to be built on top of
a managed language.

Various Java-based OSes were built a few years ago, and there is a very
cute one called "jnode" that has matured a lot in the last few months.

> I think that most of the OS kernel, and everything on top of that, can be
> managed (although not safe) code. C# supports unsafe pointers, and that can
> be used to implement memory management (which is needed by the runtime) and
> most resource management functions you'd expect in a kernel. I conjecture
> that we only need asm and C/C++ for a boot loader and a small library of
> architecture-dependent functionality (interrupts, context switching, TLB
> flushing, and GDT/IDT setup come to mind).

This is one possibility, there are many more in between, you can
certainly tune how much code you want in C/C++/assembler and how much
code you want to keep managed. 

Are you still in MIT?   The Novell office is next to the Stata center,
we could do lunch some time.   Also we are having our annual Mono Summit
this week and the next, it might be interesting to talk.

Miguel.


 				
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