Experimental OS development using D

[Harry Vennik]

Hi all,

I announced this project just a little more than one year ago, but then I had to stop it right away because
of some personal problems. Recently I picked it up again, but to really gain any progress, I really need
help from one or more real D gurus, as there is one very essential problem I cannot solve myself.

I'd like to build my OS on top of the OKL4 microkernel from Open Kernel Labs. That microkernel is
written in C and C++, but in my OS, everything running on top of it should be in D. (Although it might
be that I use some existing servers at first, and replace them by D-implementations later.)

Now I'd like to have automated code generation for IPC, without using IDL. I.e. i want to be able to
simply code a D interface and then have some way to expose that interface to be called through IPC,
without the need to write the actual IPC code over and over again for each interface. Ideally the IPC code
would be compatible to code generated from IDL through magpie, as such would allow D-clients to call
C-servers and vice versa, this is not a requirement however.

Currently I feel like this is the most difficult part to code of the whole OS (maybe just because I do have
quite some knowledge about OSes, but almost nothing about compilers and code generation...)

Anyone interested to help me to get this done?

Regards,

Harry

== Quote from John Reimer (terminal.node at gmail.com)'s article
> On Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:36:26 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For
> Email) wrote:
> > Harry Vennik wrote:
> >> Is there anyone here who is interested in working with me to get that project going, and help by
> >> contributing in the development of a specification and/or in implementation of those (including
PoC
> >> coding)?
> >
> > Just in case nobody has mentioned it: a small and elegant UNIX kernel to
> > use as a source of inspiration is Minix 3 (http://www.minix3.org/).
> >
> > I've seen Tanenbaum talking about it, and Minix 3 is a fresh new
> > approach to OS design featuring high modularity: the kernel itself
> > boasts only 4000 lines of code. It would be interesting to see how that
> > translates in D.
> >
> > Andrei
> Very interesting!
> I'll download the svn source and check it out. :)
> -JJR