This forks out of the "Ruby's role in future OSs" thread, since it deals
with something completely different than the discussed there.
When someone suggested a ruby-based kernel, he was responded by "that'd be
taking things too far".
Well, if we consider Moore's law and YAMV, I think it isn't.
Apart from all else, Ruby is too highly abstract for an OS kernel,
which would have to manage CPU registers, byte addressed memory and
I/O hardware.
And almost no software ever uses kernel APIs directly. C/C++ projects
use the C library, which abstracts over many different kernels, and
that is as low as you get. Most other interpreter/compilers boil down
to using the C compiler and its library in the end, including ruby, java,
perl, php, ...
I know a ruby kernel would be a desperate effort to continue the M$ policy
of making OSs make up for changes in computer speed and beat Moore, who
works for a competitor ( 
) but
still, the advantages would be well worth it (depending on ruby being at par
with Java regarding speed):
Development time of apps for an OS who's native API is ruby dinamic objects
would go drastically down. Drastically. It's like developers choosing to use
ruby today even though it's much slower than C, since their time is worth
more than CPU time. Remember how much better ruby itself would be in a
system that would not demand it to interface with un-OOP stuff all the time
(which I feel the most dirty when I do in ruby - it's just not right to
output a file when you have everything as objects).
Such an OS would be naturally reflective, a feature that would make the
world (and especially the business world) a far better and more productive
place.
Everything in such a system would be interdependent is a way that would make
customization a breaze - mixins would provide, for example, natural handling
of "file types" - you just extend the type object to do the services you
want.
Well that is all conjecture -- just because the kernel is written in
Ruby, neither of these features would be present neccessarily. And
neither is a kernel written in ruby *required* for having them, or
even useful.. Just write a ruby library with your desired API. Maybe
have a DRb server running to handle requests (like syscalls).
Ruby is almost ready: it has natural threading and natural object security.
It only needs /better/ natural object permissions, transparent saving of the
environment on disk and a natural GUI that is done the-Ruby-way (tm)(r)(c).
A way to load C extentions from within ruby in runtime (I mean, write C code
in a ruby text editor, invoke gcc from the editor and dinamically load the
resulting .so) would help, too, and it's almost possible (well, it is, but
not as simple as it should be). From there it would be a matter of months to
create an OS that uses a linux kernel for bootstrap, memory management,
basic disk i/o and networking and ruby for /everything/ else. Such a system
could be programmed easily from within itself using, say VMWare.
Why is it too much?
- Ruby os totally unready for in-kernel deployment. No low level
hardware access.
- Ruby's threading is not adequate for an OS kernel. Besides not
beeing SMP-able, a kernel needs to do isolating multi-process
management too, or you end up with a very insecure and unstable OS.
- Performance. For a piece of software which is run really a lot by a
lot of people, it makes sense to invest time into it to make it fast.
Now OS kernels are run by every user of this OS all the time, so this
is on the extreme end of where you don't want to trade development
time for execution time.
- Ruby, as of now, relies heavily on a C library. When Ruby calls a
C library function, the library might go to the kernel, which is Ruby
itself again, which depends on the C library ...
- I speculate you might embed a rewritten, absolutely self contained
ruby interpreter into the linux kernel, and have it do non-essential
work (drivers, modules). But since you want to delegate the most
important OS jobs to the linux kernel part anyway (memory, I/O,
process management) the resulting kernel's API will be not much
different than linux is now.
- A GUI is not a required part of an OS kernel.
- Let's assume you succeed writing this linux-ruby kernel-GUI, and
change the API to be ruby-ish. Now you have a new system architecture,
but no software for it. Since your kernel is by your definition
nowhere close to POSIX-family, it will be very hard, if not
impossible, to port the C-library to it, which is the foundation of
everything else. ANSI C *requires* byte adressable memory (with bytes
having a minimum of 8 bits), but your ruby-ish API only provides
object references.
That said, if you want to provide a more ruby-ish environment, go
ahead, but do it as a library/server, make your own GUI, and run it
under plain linux. That way you can do it piecemeal, step by step, and
at the same time keep access to all the other wonderful software not
written in ruby (yet).
J眉rgen
路路路
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 04:38:30PM +0900, Son SonOfLilit wrote:
--
The box said it requires Windows 95 or better so I installed Linux
) but