Off-Topic > Off-Topic - Tiny Tux's Corner

Kolibri - a desktop operating system in under 3 MB

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nick65go:
Unix way, or not, maybe is not important for some people. It is a free world out there, each on his way.
Someone need just an optimized engine for his car. And not a general engine for any airplane or submarine U-boat. Thanks for the history. But Apple with its dedicated devices (restricted components) has won the market, same as google. Even I dislike both, but I use them. Mais c'est la vie, toujours bâtard.

PDP-8:
Yeah, sorry about that.  I don't mean to come off like some energy-drink fueled history teacher.  Just can't help it when I see complaints of size.

There's a time and place for it, but systems programming isn't one of them.  However, you did bring back memories of an assembly program I
absolutely *loved* back in my dos days:  Eric Meyer's VDE editor.

Being all assembly, it smoked!  What really blows my mind is that after a TWENTY ONE year haitus, it has returned!

https://sites.google.com/site/vdeeditor/Home/vde-files

If one is still using ms-dos, freedos, or maybe even an older version of windows on ancient hardware - this editor is for you!  Columnar editing in
something this small and fast blew my mind, and I whipped out the shareware fee back when it wasn't free.

Caution:  if you like this, you may be able to transition to the portable JOE editor, which can be called by either joe (native keybdindings), jstar (wordstar)
or jpico (pico / nano) keybindings. 

xor:
Considering that ASM has left its place to LLVM, a portable language !
What are the chances of this project coming back to life!?


--- Quote from: PDP-8 on October 23, 2021, 05:29:57 PM ---The reason it is so small is that it is written entirely in assembly language.  Definitely NOT the unix way!

Which means it is non-portable and machine specific.  It is how operating systems were written in the 60's.  Which means it is locked in time and dies with the hardware it was written for. 

Our ATT unix forefathers, nay the earlier MULTICS operating system got away from that and broke ground by being written in a high-level language, PL/I.  Unix followed suit, and instead of PL/I, a transitionary period followed with human-readable languages like BCPL, B, and eventually C.

Contrast this to another OS written at the time, the ITS timesharing system, which was also written entirely in assembly for the PDP6/PDP10 mainframes.  Greenblatt and RMS were maintainers among others.  Where is it now?  DEAD, because in assembly, there is no path forward unless you want total rewrites every time a new hardware environment is introduced.

Our forefathers, Doug Mcilroy, Ken Thompson and many others at ATT broke that ridiculously unmaintainable situation by writing systems software in a higher level language.

This small tradeoff in a larger size with human-readable languages, means that the system has a chance to be portable to other architectures, improved, and maintained well into the future.

So even back then, a small tradeoff in size vs real-world sustainability was realized. 

Kolibri is a throwback to the 60's niche-hack and definitely not the unix way.

--- End quote ---

nick65go:
@PDP-8: I tested a "distro" (KolibriOS), not made by me, and I shared my opinion about few technical things about it. I do not advertise it, because I have no gain from this and I did not contributed to it.

The tempting goals (for me) from Kolibri are its speed and size. For QEMU (secured environment) with standardized "devices" (video, audio, network, fdd / hdd / cdrom / usb) it makes sens (same as Apple made the decision to have strict specialized /optimized devices).

PS: I dislike when someone blog here, hijacking the subject. There are other ways "to teach others your way of doing things". Especially when in the last two post you did nothing constructive about Kolibri. I understand (and disagree with) your opinion about some languages (ASM) and their bright future (as seen by you). It is no need to write another 100 posts to repeat the same ideas. Or maybe you like to have the last word / impression in the forum. Why don't you open an off-topic for yourself about what is important to you, and live this alone?

xor:
artificial intelligence will one day make dreams come true. :D

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