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A comment on A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU. Parent comment

Re:A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU by mike_hearn on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:35AM (#50006309)
Maybe some day if I find the time I'd like to make a Singularity style single address space OS with GraalVM, except with a fully garbage collected unified heap. In the past it wasn't feasible for a bunch of reasons but I think they're solvable now.

If you have that then so much overhead can disappear, and you can design such better APIs.

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Re:A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU by Joker_vD on Thursday October 08, 2026 @01:07PM (#50008560)
> In the past it wasn't feasible

Wirth did it at least twice, with Medos-2 (1983) and later with various flavours of Oberon System.

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Re:A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU by mike_hearn on Friday October 09, 2026 @04:41AM (#50017760)
The challenges are different in the modern era. Things like Spectre attacks, being able to define failure domains, isolating GC pauses and so on. The tech exists to do that but not in 1983.
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Re:A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU by pjmlp on Friday October 09, 2026 @05:15AM (#50018030)
Yeah, this looks great for 1980, but not in what is expected from an OS in 2026.

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

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