Xinu – A small, elegant operating system

Re:Xinu – A small, elegant operating system by avaidyam on Sunday August 12, 2018 @12:45AM (#17742959)

Once upon a time, a colleague and myself attempted to rewrite Xinu in Rust to show Dr. Comer how cool it was. Rust did not work. It was not cool. Dr. Comer simply smiled a gentle "I told you so," as he had good reasons for sticking to C.

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Re:Xinu – A small, elegant operating system by steveklabnik on Sunday August 12, 2018 @08:07AM (#17744003)

What didn’t work?

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Re:Xinu – A small, elegant operating system by avaidyam on Sunday August 12, 2018 @10:26PM (#17747667)

We had tremendous difficulty convincing Dr. Comer that using an experimental/nightly toolchain to compile an experimental compiler variant to use experimental libraries in an experimental language was worth it.

It took us quite some time to get everything up in a way that would work on most Purdue systems and our own personal ones and from there even translating the limited codebase we were using unsafe code blocks for nearly everything (and ASM blocks) and some internal code for multicore/ACPI-related things/Galileo boards we haven't made publicly available yet, AFAIK.

At the end of the day, Xinu was small enough and very concisely written and maintained for several decades that switching to a language like Rust wasn't warranted. Similar to sqlite, I suppose. You can email me at [email protected] if you'd like to know more details/talk to Dr. Comer about Xinu things.

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Re:Xinu – A small, elegant operating system by steveklabnik on Monday August 13, 2018 @09:28AM (#17749878)

Ah, okay. That all makes sense! I thought you meant that like, the language couldn't do it at all. All the stuff you've said is the current state of things, roughly, for sure. Thanks!

(I'd love to see OS classes use Rust someday, so I'm always trying to keep an eye out for things...)

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Re:Xinu – A small, elegant operating system by avaidyam on Thursday August 16, 2018 @01:29AM (#17772151)

No worries - while I personally enjoyed Rust it was clear that it was unsustainable for Dr. Comer. He means the best, I assure you. :)

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