alt.os.development Google Group

OT: US Supreme Court may rule on validity of software patents.

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Sun, 11 Nov 2009 11:56:06 UT

US Supreme Court may indirectly rule on the validity of software patents:
[link]
Rod Pemberton

Re: Source based OS

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 22:57:41 UT

Ok.
Ah, yes, that's what I ran into. Thanks.
Yes, but as a.o.d. is on the other side of this conversation (with at least
me on both... ). :-)
It's an interesting idea to use a compiler (or interpreter) for OS startup,
instead of precompiled binaries to start an OS. Not only is the compiler
(or interpreter) being used to bootstrap the OS, but it's doing so in

Re: Source based OS

a...@inbox.ru (Aleksej Saushev) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 22:35:18 UT

NetBSD kernel may be built with pcc, which is another small C compiler,
AFAIR changes were pretty minimal.

Re: Source based OS

antivigila...@pyrabang.com (Anti Vigilante) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 21:50:41 UT

Binfmtc seems like a good way to at least experiment with the ideas.
I'm going to finish my own little language shortly and then start diving
in.
I removed comp.lang.forth as I won't be needing it until I add it as an
interface to the different layers.

Re: Source based OS

john.passan...@gmail.com (John Passaniti) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 21:13:35 UT

The README that comes with tccboot describes the changes and the
archive has the 15k diff file to apply to the Linux sources. I don't
see why this technique couldn't be applied to any version of Linux,
*BSD Unix, or any other operating system written in C. But it would
be silly to do so. tcc is not an optimizing compiler, so the code it

Re: Source based OS

pksharmakolk...@gmail.com (peekay) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 15:43:43 UT

maybe following Ray's present attempts to explain
in text and movie formats will be able to give the
needed insight into colorForth source codes
another member (jmdrake) has also uploaded a
remarkable writeup
[link]
(look in *pages* and also *files* sections)

Re: Source based OS

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 10:18:04 UT

doing
Good call!
I was aware of tcc and tccboot. But, I was interested in the C
compiler/compilation techniques and was uninterested in Linux being compiled
from sources.
Is there more info on what "minor modification" and "added a bit of code"
means? And, did they do too much for anyone to recreate on a 2.6.x kernel?

Re: Source based OS

alexfrun...@gmail.com (Alexei A. Frounze) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 09:56:35 UT

Oh, how I want that. And not just from the application, but from the
application under the debugger, including applications w/o source
code, just symbols or none at all. :)
Alex

Re: Source based OS

john.passan...@gmail.com (John Passaniti) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 09:26:56 UT

One such operating system is... Linux. It's from four years ago:
[link]
It's more a proof-of-concept toy than something useful, but I found it
amusing. They started with a C compiler that fits in 100k of object
code and generates native code. Then, they took a full Linux kernel

Re: Source based OS

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 03:35:28 UT

...
It sounds like REXX might be of interest to programmers who don't like much
syntax:
[link]
Rod Pemberton
(dropped unresponsive comp.lang.forth)

Re: Source based OS

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Thu, 11 Nov 2009 03:03:56 UT

FORTH is about the closest thing to a source based OS. Most of the FORTH
system (OS and language) is in FORTH. The reason is that most FORTH "words"
(subroutines or procedures) are written in FORTH. There is only a small
subset of "words" (sometimes called "primitives") that are coded in assembly

Re: May your privileged stack always be big enough

james.harri...@googlemail.com (James Harris) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:14:58 UT

Thanks. I'll take a look at them.
James

Re: Source based OS

do_not_h...@nohavenot.cmm (Rod Pemberton) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:24:17 UT

Have you asked in comp.lang.forth? (added)
Rod Pemberton

Re: nanokernel and persistent activation record

derrick.ke...@gmail.com (derrick) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:01:47 UT

Rod everything you say about an l4 kernel also applies to QNX
Neutrino

Source based OS

antivigila...@pyrabang.com (Anti Vigilante) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:33:15 UT

I'm interested in the development of a source based Operating System.
Such is already possible in color Forth, but I get headaches when doing
postfix somersaults.
The idea is that after boot all software is either in source form in
folders on the filesystem or in binary form in a cache area which is