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

[Martin Hinks]

It is indeed a very interesting concept....

Surely the main limiting factor will be that the runtime is never
going to be as fast as unmanaged C for low level tasks such as
file/memory management...

Martin

On 10/30/06, jmacdonagh <johann at macdonaghs.com> wrote:
>
> Glad to see I'm not the only one interested in ths. I've also toyed around
> with this idea for some time. I began looking at traditional operating
> system development to learn a little more.
>
> I envision an operating system where applications and shared libraries are
> first-class citizens. Meaning, the operating system knows exactly what is
> installed (and doesn't rely on an installer to tell it that an application
> is installed), what versions are installed, and what dependencies they have.
> IL assemblies provide all of this (versioning and dependencies).
>
> It ended up coming down to me deciding what language I would consider
> first-class. Meaning, what language or runtime environment would my
> operating system consider first-class. I could choose C/C++, but that locks
> people into a language. Instead, I could choose IL, which can be generated
> by any number of languages.
>
> I'm very interested in this project. You can do a LOT with unsafe code in
> C#, more than enough to write most of a kernel (especially if GRUB was used
> as the bootloader). But the problem regarding the runtime still arises. We
> would still need a runtime in the background, which would most likely be
> unmanaged. Mono comes to mind ;)
>
> My abstract idea was to look at how IL assemblies could communicate with the
> mono runtime. If we could break it down into some standards (such as
> standard shared library calls), then we could simply load the mono runtime
> environment first, and have that load up the actual kernel.
>
> I have many more ideas for such an operating system, including an operating
> system regulated area for application configuration files, as well as a
> regulated system for overriding configuration files (making a removal of an
> application completely seamless).
>
> If anyone else is interested, just reply back.
>
> Regards,
>
> Johann MacDonagh
>
>
>
> Suresh Shukla-2 wrote:
> >
> > This is very interesting idea.
> >
> > I had been thinking about this for some time. To bring the language
> > cleanliness and clarity of Java / C# down to OS layer.
> >
> > The OS I have in my focus is mikrokernel based distributed servers
> > architecture, actually MINIX. Minix brings many best practices and
> > cleanliness from OS side.
> >
> > In my opinion a compiler for generating native code from C# would be
> > required. Then the task could boil down to a port/rewrite of MINIX.
> >
> > Suresh
> >
> >
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-- 
Martin Hinks
http://www.pynchon.net/