Rust-Written Redox OS Now Supports GDB Debugging

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rust-Written Redox OS Now Supports GDB Debugging

For helping to debug more issues within the Rust-written Redox operating system, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is beginning to work well on the platform...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Redox-OS-Does-GDB-Debugging

[nadro]

IMO it's little weird decision to start writing OS, just to bring to source code some ideas and solutions available in a given programming language.

[OpenSourceAnarchist]

IMO it's little weird decision to start writing OS, just to bring to source code some ideas and solutions available in a given programming language.

IMO seems kinda weird to write an operating system based on MINIX just because some Finnish dude didn't like the educational licensing restrictions at the time and couldn't wait for GNU and BSD to release their own OS compatible with a specific CPU type. But around here no one complains that Linux was written as a personal experiment.

There are thousands of operating systems and kernels written to explore language features, and the reason for people deciding to work on them is as weird as any other decision to take on a long-term learning project. There can be no success in the open-source community without programmers dedicated to their passion projects.

[elatllat]

Always good to see RedoxOS progress.

[Raka555]

I wish they will release an image again so we can check it out.Build from source, fails for me.

I think it is great that they are doing it and hope that it "goes places".

[kpedersen]

IMO it's little weird decision to start writing OS, just to bring to source code some ideas and solutions available in a given programming language.

Wrapping an existing OS in rust bindings might end up being more difficult (and less safe) than re-writing it in rust from a much lower level. I.e think how much easier it would be to provide bindings for a drawing API rather than an entire GUI library (with inheritance, callbacks etc).

I am fairly excited about this project because it is pretty much the first attempt to write a UNIX-like operating system in a safe systems-level language.

And if the lower levels are Rust, future software built on top will not require so many dependencies (i.e SDL, libX11 wrappers) so less dependence on external projects and dragging in lots of crap via crates.io (the one slight weakness of Rust I see so far).

[kpedersen]

The same applies to project blurbs on GitHub too. You surely know your project is irrelevant, when the only way to attract interest is by using language hype.

Haha, I kinda see what you mean. For many languages I find this important though. For example I can quickly see if a project is written in Python or Perl, I know to run a mile or piss around with PIP and CPAN dependencies for the next year.

I do find it relieving to see "written in ANSI C89 with few dependencies" on some projects. Nothing worse than seeing a great project, only for it to be written in the very latest C++ standard, (limiting its portability for the next 10 years) and drag in the entirety of boost just so it can be written in some broken asynchronous way.

[cl333r]

IMO it's little weird decision to start writing OS, just to bring to source code some ideas and solutions available in a given programming language.

Don't be such a pessimist, in 40 years it could out-compete GNU Hurd.

[mdedetrich]

r

Why does every single Rust-related article have to include the phrase "Rust-written" [sic]. Is being written in Rust a feature in itself now?

The same applies to project blurbs on GitHub too. You surely know your project is irrelevant, when the only way to attract interest is by using language hype.

Probably because Rust eliminates the biggest weakness of C/C++, manual memory management along with all of the associated security issues.

This is a big deal, Microsoft did an internal survey and figured out that 70% of their security issues are due to this weakness in C/C++

A kernel written in Rust will have much fewer security issues without sacrificing performance (Rust actually comes ahead of typical C code when it comes to performance if you compare apples with apples)

[starshipeleven]

being written in Rust a feature in itself now?

Yes, yes it is.