[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[ron minnich]

I started u-root in 2011 because I did not want to do a yocto or onei or
buildroot ever again. u-root has found wide application in firmware. U-root
runs on anything Go runs on. Andrea Barisini has even targeted Go to bare
metal with Tamago, and u-root runs there too. Tinygo can compile much of it
to its 200 bare metal targets as well.

The late Andrey Mirtchovski, known to many of you, contributed a lot to the
early going.

I should not digress too much from TUHS here, so I'll leave it at that.



On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 7:41 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 7:11 PM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 7:26 PM segaloco via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>> > Given that anything that obeys the ABI and has assembler entries to the
>> kernel
>> > can request services, it seems to me it would be possible to stand up a
>> > user-land without C being present.  Have any UNIXen ever done this
>> after the
>> > advent of C?
>>
>> Kind of. u-root is a userland in Go, but is more targeted towards
>> embedded applications (Ron will correct me if I am mistaken there)
>
>
> Yea. It's reason to exist is for LinuxBoot scripting, though lots of other
> uses are possible. I know it from LinuxBoot...
>
> uutils is a Rust reimplementation of most of the GNU coreutils tools,
>> but not (I don't think) the C library.
>>
>
> Correct. Rust uses it's own library for system calls. This is a never
> ending series of problems for FreeBSD since the C API sometimes differs
> slightly with what's passed to the kernel and those seemingly trivial
> differences cause bugs. Also, new system calls can take a while (years) to
> appear. FreeBSD moved inodes to 64 bits 10 years ago and it was only in the
> last years that rust stopped using the old 32bit inode system calls.
>
> Warner
>
>         - Dan C.
>>
>
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