Clive: A New Operating System Written In The Go Language

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clive: A New Operating System Written In The Go Language

For the fans of Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system, there's a new open-source operating system inspired by it and Nix. This new operating system, Clive, is quite interesting at least from a technical perspective...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY5OTQ

[Garp]

Clive? zx?

I'm guessing that's a reference to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Sinclair
and the venerable ZX80, ZX81 and ZX Spectrum lines of computers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX80 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

[BSDude]

My first impression of Michael's allusion to the Plan 9 OS was a skepticism for the project.

I'm actually curious how a similar project would look like in Rust.

[Daktyl198]

iirc, somebody already wrote a kernel in Rust. It didn't do much, just boot to a red screen, but it was really only there for a proof-of-concept.

I think it would be interesting (and awesome) to re-write many parts of the current Linux OS ecosystem (not really the kernel, though even then some modules could use it) in Rust, due to it's inherent memory safety... I could donate a few bucks a week to a project aiming to do this...

[EmbraceUnity]

iirc, somebody already wrote a kernel in Rust. It didn't do much, just boot to a red screen, but it was really only there for a proof-of-concept.

I think it would be interesting (and awesome) to re-write many parts of the current Linux OS ecosystem (not really the kernel, though even then some modules could use it) in Rust, due to it's inherent memory safety... I could donate a few bucks a week to a project aiming to do this...

Totally agree. Rust is fascinating, and I would love to see a system stack based on it. It is a huge undertaking, though. But we need to wipe the slate clean in a lot of areas. A good first step would be to rewrite LibreSSL in Rust.

[Daktyl198]

Totally agree. Rust is fascinating, and I would love to see a system stack based on it. It is a huge undertaking, though. But we need to wipe the slate clean in a lot of areas. A good first step would be to rewrite LibreSSL in Rust.

I personally think that would be a huge mistake. I was thinking more along the lines of things like gnutils replacements, network-manager, other things that almost every Linux-based OS relies upon. Better yet would be the somewhat developmentally stagnant things that we still use (can't think of any examples off the top of my head). Re-writing a cryptographic library in Rust would, obviously, be a great thing but... it would be a huge undertaking.
Not to mention it's not really feasible. The group of people who know Rust and the group of people who know how to write a cryptographic library don't exactly intersect at the moment...

[curaga]

If inherently safer languages are that worthy, why did none of you advocate for Ada before Rust existed?

[log0]

If inherently safer languages are that worthy, why did none of you advocate for Ada before Rust existed?

The problem imho is that there hasn't been much advocacy to use safer languages for security related consumer software at all. Rust is just the new kid on the block. Personally I'd be all for having the crypto stuff being implemented in Ada or SPARK.

[c117152]

The problem imho is that there hasn't been much advocacy to use safer languages for security related consumer software at all. Rust is just the new kid on the block. Personally I'd be all for having the crypto stuff being implemented in Ada or SPARK.

No. The issue of safety is moot since Java was advocated and made successful because of it's relative safety when compared to C++ and C where Ada failed despite being better performing at the time.
The language features have nothing to do with Ada's lack of popularity. The reason no one used it was because it was a DoD project that was directed by a closed group at the time and the compilers cost a lot of money.
By comparison C rose to success because it's compiler was bundled freely with Unix as it was used in Academia. Similarly, Microsoft pushed C# leveraging it's influence on University introduction courses to programming instead of Java.

Overall, like with all things, programming languages rise and fall due to of politics and corporate interests and not over technical details.

[BSDude]

Overall, like with all things, programming languages rise and fall due to of politics and corporate interests and not over technical details.

Objective-C comes to mind.