No, but I had used it extensively and written a fairly large amount of code for it so it was mostly re-implementing how I thought things must work under the hood. The hardest part was to bridge some of the posix like functionality to this rather strange set of primitives, especially 'fork' and the '/dev/' parts required some pretty hacky solutions. But they work and they ended up being quite reliable.

As for it being lightyears ahead of Minix: Minix was built from the ground up as a platform to demonstrate how Unix works without being Unix. QnX and by extension my version on that theme was built from day one to be low latency and to have the smallest possible kernel footprint that you could have. The lack of a root file system and the Plan-9 like network transparency are all as a result of that and allow extremely fine grained control over what goes into the final package. It is far more suitable for low level control while at the same time having high level tooling than Minix. What I loved about Minix is the way the source code is organized and how - and this is obviously no accident - it reads as a textbook, I learned a lot from looking at the code and ended up adopting the file system as a stand-alone piece of code (which allowed me to pass files in and out of the OS early on by writing them under one OS and then rebooting so I had access on the other side).

Amazing, thanks. Is it possible to just have a look at the source code somewhere, e.g. codeberg or gitlab? I'm especially interested in the microkernel IPC.