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Behind Menuet, an OS Written Entirely In Assembly

Posted by Soulskill on from the keep-it-simple dept.

angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an operating system written entirely in assembly language. As a result it's extremely quick and compact (it can even fit on a floppy disk, despite having a GUI). It can run Quake. Two of the developers behind MenuetOS took time out to talk about what inspired them to undertake the daunting task of writing the operating system, the current state of Menuet and future plans for it."

1 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. That's just dumb. And kinda cool. by localman57 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The article is slashdotted, so I'll post a thought without RTFA. I do embedded firmware for a living; assembly programming is part of my job. But unless you have to fit all of your software into a $.42 micro, there's no reason to write all your software in assembly. Typically, you get most of your performance gains by rewriting 5% or less of the software in assembly [Citation needed... :-)]. As for the rest, go with C or higher for maintainability and portability.

    6 months from now, a new processor revision will provide enough marginal performance to make up for not coding the other 95% in assembly.

    That said, this is a monumentally cool achievement, if academic.