what you’re experiencing is more or less why I am building some stuff in Zig instead of Rust

Looks like it's multiboot compliant, so you can pick your favorite multiboot loader. ipxe, grub, pretty sure there's some other ones out there.

As it's multiboot, it should likely run on v86 too. It's always fun to have an in browser demo of a little OS like this.

If you want to use Grub, this tutorial works (see "Booting the kernel"):

https://wiki.osdev.org/Zig_Bare_Bones

Yes, just tried it.

From the GitHub page:

> It boots on an x86 (i386) machine via the Multiboot 1 protocol

Yes, it does need a compliant bootloader on virtual or physical hardware.

I agree, I'd not call this a kernel. It does not allow any software to be run on top of it. It just prints text to screen and halts.

Even saying it "runs" on QEMU is a far stretch: it "halts", that's all it does. :)

(it does run on hardware as per other commenters in this HN convo)

Because you can is a pretty traditional reason.

Zig is supposed to be an improvement upon C, so doing C things with it seems reasonable.

Kind of neat that there's no need for a separate assembly file although there is inline assembly. Might get better (or worse) syntax support for separate assembly files? But it doesn't make a big difference until there's more features that need it (interrupts, threads/processes and maintaining their stacks, syscalls, starting other processors, etc)

I guess one of good reasons is easy cross-compilation.

But also, I can see some amount of weird hooray optimism in this project, like: totally confusing claim that the thing is bare metal when it's still being run under an emulator; also, calling it a kernel is a huge overstatement

In this case, better tooling and consistency. E.g. the small block of inline assembly would already be trouble for some C compilers.

Zig is essentially a substantially improved and enhanced C, both in character and intent. There is a lot to recommend it for applications where you might otherwise use C.

Fun?

because Zig is simply a better C, often faster (normally at least as fast), but with way more safety guarantees or at least things preventing the vast majority of traditional C footguns from happening

What's the point writing another kernel in C ???

because zig is lower level than c

Both tutorials work fine on latest stable zig (0.15.2)

Thanks for sharing

Indeed, it's freestanding, the repo name doesn't have the correct term, but the source file does near the end: https://github.com/lopespm/zig-minimal-kernel-x86/blob/main/...

Also baremetal where the metal is virtual. LLVM uses this term for when an OS isn't available https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/libc/src/stdl...

I'm not that cluey, but from the README it sounds like it can be compiled for a bunch of arches