Rust-Based Redox OS Had A Busy Year With Rewriting Its Kernel, Writing A File-System

[nomadewolf]

Overall this project seems very promising and interesting.
It brings much needed new look into the OpenSource scene.
Wether they had to go and create a new FS is debatable... especially with bcachefs being already usable (albeit, with some extra work, maybe).
Effort duplication is one of the achilles heels of linux, but when it works is one of it's bigger strengths.

So i hope this project succeeds and gets wide adoption.


EDIT:
Just dound out that the SPECK encryption algorithm that the FS uses was created by NSA...
For that reason alone i don't plan on using the FS.

[Nobu]

I find it hard to believe that you find it hard to believe that Redox, which is roughly one and a half year old, that is programmed in a programming language that is stable for the same amount of time is not as good as ReactOS, which is roughly 20 years old, that is programmed in a programming language that is roughly 40 years old.

To be fair, ReactOS is trying to be a compatible Windows system, quirks and all. Also, age isn't directly corelated to quality, and the size of the ReactOS project makes it more likely to have bugs in unexpected places. OTOH, Redox is relatively small, and designed using modern OS design and programming principals from the ground up, so it's not hard to imagine it's already at least as good as ReactOS.

That said, it no doubt has many missing/unimplemented features, the design will be in flux for a while yet, and there will be bugs found and fixed along the way. Whereas ReactOS is more or less (feature) complete, and needs only bugfixes and minor features implemented or reimplemented more correctly.

[starshipeleven]

I find it hard to believe that you find it hard to believe that Redox, which is roughly one and a half year old, that is programmed in a programming language that is stable for the same amount of time is not as good as ReactOS, which is roughly 20 years old, that is programmed in a programming language that is roughly 40 years old.

So what? Can't there be more variables than just age of language?
Now if I write something in assembler that is more ancient than C itself for the next decade it becomes automatically better than whatever was written in C in a year? WTF of reasoning is that?

ReactOS's biggest issue is that it is based off reverse engineering windows, and that is the hard part, that is what is slowing it down massively.

[Luke_Wolf]

Should I take this as positive or negative? Is it better or worse than ReactOS (I find it hard to believe that it is worse than ReactOS)?

They're far enough along to have a basic unix-like system working with a basic DE, emphasis on the basic. There's a few programs that they have that just hang and you can't close the window (indicating they're using client side decorations), and you have to kill those windows through the terminal. Their sh has no tab completion, and their package manager is basically non-functional (attempting to install rust, which is the only thing I could be sure was in their repos as it has no search function, just hung the process), also man didn't provide manpages for anything I tried. Virtualbox also had to be specially configured in order to get input devices working (which is to saying setting it to ICH9)

The post that this article is quoting makes it sound like they are a lot further along than they really are, however they are definitely much further along than I would have expected. I wouldn't be too surprised to see it become usable within the confines of (limited) desktop usage within 5 years. That doesn't mean competitive to Linux or BSD or whatever on the desktop at that point, but given where they are now I find it entirely plausible for them to begin dogfooding on a limited set of hardware by that point.

Regardless I think having a project like this with this much effort behind it is actually a really good and important thing for rust to be successful, because it ensures that things that need to get to get written (like language native toolkits, IDEs, and support libraries) are, and it lets rust proponents actually go through and rewrite the world.

[lordnaikon]

So what? Can't there be more variables than just age of language?

Sure it can, you can tell by reading my post.

Now if I write something in assembler that is more ancient than C itself for the next decade it becomes automatically better than whatever was written in C in a year? WTF of reasoning is that?

I don't know, you tell me because you made that up clearly by yourself. I was never saying that anyone automatically writes better code in C than Rust.

ReactOS's biggest issue is that it is based off reverse engineering windows, and that is the hard part, that is what is slowing it down massively.

sure, i am not telling you otherwise. But i hope you can imagine that React OS would not be 20x better as todays Windows if they had the full specs on paper. These things are just inherently horribly time consuming even without reverse engineering and you just don't code something like React OS down in a few month even without reverse engineering and with absolute knowledge of whats going on there. This is just disparaging the hard work that goes into React OS by every member of the React OS team!

[starshipeleven]

rust proponents actually go through and rewrite the world.

I like the sound of this.

[starshipeleven]

Wouldn't it be better if instead of reinventing the wheel they would use their limited lifespan to build upon the world? Windows is dominant. Accept it. Move on. There are a lot of things not yet done that can be done. Don't make another OS. Don't build a new language and waste years reimplementing the stdlib.

In the name of RMS, Torvalds and Pottering... I'm telling you to stfu and gtfo.

[DrYak]

Wouldn't it be better if instead of reinventing the wheel they would use their limited lifespan to build upon the world?

Beside, the whole point of Redux OS isn't to reinvent the wheel but see if Rust is a good tool (by testing it at building wheels).
The fact that there's an OS coming out this is a side effect to the main goal of seeing how far the limits of Rust can be pushed.

There's no purpose in a toy language that isn't used beside a few test demos.
Making an OS is as real as you can get when trying to put Rust at real-world usage (in addition of making a browser).

Windows is dominant. Accept it. Move on.

My router begs to disagree (by AVM runing Firtz!OS : Linux + busybox like nearly any modern router).
My smartphone too (running Sailfish OS, a full blown GNU/Linux system) as are the smartphone of other family members (mostly running Android, also built upon the Linux kernel albeit with a different userland).
Same as for our e-Books (Kobo, running Linux with a Qt based interface - and Android is popular on ebooks to, see Tolino for an example).
Our tablets are running Android.
Even the Wifi-Sharing feature of the SD card inside my photo camera (it runs a small embed Linux file server).

Our house, like many other is running several dozens of little noticed Linux instances next to the 1-2 Windows laptops.

So in practice, *Linux* is dominant, except for a few soon-to-be legacy platforms were Windows is still clinging.