A different kind of Walter? :-)

Brad Roberts braddr at puremagic.com
Tue Apr 17 18:59:04 PDT 2007


Alexander Panek wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Alexander Panek wrote:
>>> I'm sure going to spend some time getting a proper codebase for further
>>> development done, and write some documentation about how to actually
>>> get to the point of being able to write an operating system with D. I
>>> think that's a major weak point of D, as it claims to be a systems
>>> language, but there's no actual system written in it from scratch,
>>> neither documentation on how to achieve that.
>>
>> Andrei suggested that the source code for Minix, which is fairly 
>> small, could be transliterated from C almost directly into D. This 
>> would neatly resolve the issue, and provide a starting point for 
>> anyone wanting to take it further.
> 
> True. On the other hand, a kernel written purely in D is something that 
> really would (and will, arr) be cool! I just find it less exciting to 
> code "C with D", so to speak.
> 
> I'll make sure to announce the project, once a few milestones are 
> finished, on the newsgroups.

Pardon the curmudgeon in me, but aside from being educational and being 
able to say 'see, someone's done it', what is to be achieved from 
inventing yet another kernel?  Anything beyond a toy kernel is an 
_enormous_ effort.

I don't mean to say "don't do it".  But I'm genuinely curious what the 
goals are.  There's so many more things that would have a higher long 
term benefit to the development community as a whole that it feels like 
a waste unless it really is just a 'I want to learn more about kernels' 
sort of project.

Later,
Brad



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