Their OS is written in Zig!

    https://github.com/Ashet-Technologies/Ashet-OS

Thought it might be of interest to people learning Zig. I bet there are some interesting examples in there.

▲ rollcat 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The OS looks highly opinionated and I respect that. Better to have a single overarching vision than try to do too many things poorly.

However I will question some design choices!

- 32-bit only: the writing is on the wall, many vendors (HW&SW) are slowly moving to kill it off. I guess it's fine, but IMHO each ISA (regardless of pointer width) should just be considered a different ISA. Portability is good, it ensures your software doesn't hardcode too many assumptions about the platform - and weeds out bugs. Just treat an int like an int, and a pointer like a pointer. Distinct types.

- Pure co-op multitasking: it will be completely fine, until you try serious in-system development. Hard reboot any time I make a mistake in a for-loop? Mercy, please :,) Implementing a simple watchdog via a timer interrupt will still keep all of the scheduling logic simple and stupid: it's just another case for a yield call, except now involuntary. The runaway process will simply never see completion, but seeing that it would never yield anyway, I don't see a problem just killing it. And most importantly, the sanity shall be preserved.

▲

ikskuh 4 days ago | parent [-]

Creator here!

Yes, the OS is highly opinionated, as just making another linux is incredibly boring for me!

The 32-bit only constraint is mainly due to my focus on smaller architectures, especially microcontrollers.

x86_64 and aarch64 both have much more complex initialiastion schemes, and also use much more complex page table setups.

Thus, i wanted to keep that out of the system, considering i'm targeting systems with a tiny fraction of the 4 GiB memory limit.

The co-op multitasking is a part of the OS, and the OS doesn't give you preemptive multitasking. I never said i won't implement sanity safeguards! Just killing off a hanging process that doesnt yield for more than 1-5 secs is totally i scope and increases user friendlyness. but considering the system reboots in 1.2 s on target hw right now, the user will maybe just have hit reset by then :D

	▲	rollcat 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> considering the system reboots in 1.2 s That's not the point - it's about usability. You'd be constantly losing work. > Just killing off a hanging process that doesnt yield [...] <3 !

▲ anitil 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been following Andrew Kelley's writing and zig is probably next on the list for me (previously would have been rust). The story from C to Zig and the ease of cross compilation makes it really tempting. I haven't looked in to the comptime capabilities much but it looks like it could help with some of the embedded work I do