A Talk With Syllable OS Lead Developer Kaj de Vos

angry tapir writes "I recently had a chance to interview Kaj de Vos, the lead developer of Syllable: An open source desktop operating system that's not based on Linux nor one of the BSDs. There's a write-up of the interview here, which includes some background on the project. I have also posted the full Q&A, which is very long but definitely worth a read."

Comments

Re:NOT based on Linux?

[JabberWokky]

You seem confused. The project releases a matching server that does use Linux as the kernel. The desktop OS does not. It's based on AtheOS, a new OS from scratch with a fair amount of application support built up over the years for a minor OS.

To summarise the article.

[LingNoi]

If you're only going to read one page of this article then read page five.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/398892/developer_q_syllable_os/?pp=5

To summarise the thing that makes this different from everyone else is that the parts of an actual application are split up unix style. For example instead of having two or more applications taking your photo and taking out the red eye, the desktop would have thus functionality written once and the applications will simply glue all these standard pieces together.

My only criticism to this is that we already have this in the form of libraries. Perhaps what this guy is after is something more standardised and higher level then that but I don't see how that's not doable in linux.

Re:To summarise the article.

[oever]

That sounds very much like Android Intents and Activities.

An Intent provides a facility for performing late runtime binding between the code in different applications. Its most significant use is in the launching of activities, where it can be thought of as the glue between activities. It is basically a passive data structure holding an abstract description of an action to be performed.

Re:Why assembly?

[XDirtypunkX]

To get any boost of performance over C, you have to be an extremely good assembly coder... to get a consistent 3x boost, you are either writing very sloppy C, or you're extremely good at assembly and using a pretty poor compiler/poor compiler settings. It actually takes an amazing amount of effort to beat a compiler these days, because compilers have rules to spot non-obvious stalls and such, where as the human has to rely on analyzing every bit of that by hand.

Also, a system where every component is 3x faster is still only 3x faster overall, there is no Captain Planet performance magic where by the power of assembly combined you get a 20x speed up... not to mention many desktop operations being IO limited (especially the ones that you actually notice the slow down on) and assembly doesn't magically make that faster.

Finally, someone did try it - MenuetOS - and they were able to make a quite compact and fast OS. But they also cut out an awful lot of what goes into a modern OS to do so. Syllable itself is not written in assembly like MenuetOS, which was actually the example used above.