31 Jan
2023
31 Jan
'23
3:19 a.m.
On 1/30/23, Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote:
This wish is perhaps shared by no one else but
I'd still love to have a
system where the kernel has the clean
architectural lines of plan9 + more good stuff from it, and a Unixy API for
many existing programs, perhaps as a shared lib. And I don't want all the
heft of BSD or Linux kernels!
Now this may be quite impractical (like trying to make C as safe as Rust)
but that is what I want! I just think there is a lot more here that can be
explored further.
I'm writing something sort of like that. Specifically it will be a
QNX-like OS in which literally everything is a file (even all process
state and memory), with pretty much the only real primitives being
variants of read()/write(), and everything else will be built on top
of those (even other file APIs like open()/close()/stat()). The
user-level API will be mostly compatible with conventional Unix, but
will be split into multiple libraries rather than throwing everything
in libc (there will be a base system library implementing the core
file API, and libc and a few other libraries implementing a relatively
standard Unix API will sit on top of this).