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'Cosmo' — a C#-Based Operating System
Billly Gates writes "A new operating system called Cosmo has been developed, written entirely in C#. It shows the naysayers you can write a full OS kernel without C. So far, you need Visual Studio to compile and run it, as Mono is not supported. However, the source code can be compiled with the Express editions of Visual Studio. The project plans to add VB.NET support soon."
The project is called Cosmos.
This article is a failure on so many levels. It's about a dead project that sounds pointless in the first place, and they didn't even get the name right in the headline or summary.
It's a trifecta of fail all at once.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What happened to the "because I could" spirit of the true hacker?
We have stories of people building CPUs inside of game logic that is in itself running on a virtual machine that runs on top of a hardware abstraction layer that runs inside a kernel that might very well be running under the purview of a hypervisor. What is the point?
There isn't a point other than to wave your hand at the mountain of functional but completely useless triumph and say "I did that; I built that mountain".
If you have to ask why someone would waste their time on something like this, you miss the point of hackerdom. Turn in your badge at the door.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
God forbid anyone just think it's neat for the sake of doing it. No, everyone has to go on an anti-Microsoft rant. Personally, I think it's kinda cool. I'd never use it for anything, but it's still cool that it was done. Instead of shitting on the developers just be happy they did something outside of the norm.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
What happened to the "because I could" spirit of the true hacker?
Slashdot lost that a good few years back.
These days cool geek projects only get slammed for every non-real reason they can come up with against the true hacker spirit. Most of the sites users seem to be 20 years old or younger, so 'early computing' to them is a single core Pentium 2 with ram still measured in megabytes instead of just bytes, and processing power still measured in ghz or mhz above one.
Then again I've found this to be true on most sites that claim to cater to geeks and hackers as of late, forums just flooded with anti-geek and anti-hacker types.
Somehow slashdot attracts a lot of the anti-technology crowd too, the type who feel if their current method of doing something was 65% efficient, getting that up to 67% efficient is worthless because it doesn't solve every last problem, while the other half of the members scream how the rest of the world having problems is a perfectly legit reason to not allow hackers to hack and learn things.
It's very pathetic and sad, but there seems to be no escape from it.
I'm just glad to know when the IT bubble pops, those are the types who will be lost in this world with no skills left that matter, while the true hacker types will be the ones rebuilding everything
Sure, the project hasn't gone anywhere for a while, and C# isn't going to be most people's choice for systems programming without a whole lot of changes. But we need to face the fact that C is outdated.
A lot of the basic tradeoffs made in its design are based on assumptions that are no longer true. An example: C's need to have everything declared in the same functional unit before use and reliance on preprocessor #includes. In 1970, saving compiler effort and putting this burden on the programmer rather than having a more complex system for resolving symbols may have been an acceptable tradeoff; with modern machines it's ridiculous. Many other C design decisions have been shown to cause problems, confusions, and common security-problem-inducing bugs.
In the past 40 years, a lot of new ideas have emerged which make writing software simpler, faster, and better-organized; some ideas which make code safer or allow the compiler etc to do better optimization have emerged too. Parallelization/multithreading and concurrency have come to the forefront of programming problems, and languages can do better at taking it into account.
All this time, we've been writing almost all our most critical software with the same language K&R designed 40 years ago, or with something like C++ which inherits all its problems and none of its simplicity. Sure, people can point out a handful of examples of OSes built in other high-level programming languages back in the day before C had major uptake. But just about every machine out there today runs on a C-based stack.
The industry needs to find a new direction sometime; we can't procrastinate it forever. Very few people have made serious efforts to replace C at the OS level with something more modern. Even D, which is one of the very few newer languages which really try to be able to replace C, has no major OS effort. We really need to get OS developers and language&compiler designers on the same page, find a better standard for systems programming, and create a platform which isn't dependent on the C legacy. I, for one, am not about to laugh at any project which attempts to undertake this daunting task.
How can you possibly call it dead without a netcraft citation?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon