A different kind of Walter? :-)

[Alexander Panek]

On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 18:59:04 -0700
Brad Roberts <braddr at puremagic.com> wrote:

> > [...]
> 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.

It's meant to be a research project, which I have started with C,
anyways, out of personal interest. System design & development is my
future occupation, hopefully, so this is educational at least for me. :)
 
> 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.

It might look like a "hackish" (yes, I call anything that's not
properly designed and implemented - with pedantic attention for each
detail - hackish..no offense intended, that just applies to my own
code) kernel would has its benefits in the long-term, but I think a
proper research to see what features of D can ease the pain of
operating system development will gain more knowledge and will
hopefully help me invent A Good Thing (tm).

I'm more the innovation-at-all-cost guy.. so.. that might be the
reason.

Still, there's quite a broad code base already regarding the
initialization of an x86 CPU, and according to hakware, interrupts are
now working properly. This means, that things like memory management
(paging, and such) is not far. I hope to bring in some benefits for D
with the memory management, too, so it can colaborate with the GC.
Don't know how far that's optimizable, but it's worth some research
effort, imho.

Anyways, it seems like quite a few people in the D community seem to be
interested in kernel development. So if one project evolved enough to
have overcome the beginning obstacles (mostly CPU weirdness-issues..),
I bet it's possible to form a team with a bit more momentum.

Best regards,
Alex