Re: Lua OS

[sergei karhof <karhof21@...>]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 5:25 AM, Alessandro Delgado
<adelgado1313@gmail.com> wrote:

> What I'd /really/ like would be a fully Lua-based operating system. Sure,
> some some C or assembler here and there, but the least possible.
>
> Taking something like eLua booting on bare x86 and make it up from there.
>
> Unfortunately, I cannot help but look at Lua OS as wanting to be just, as
> someone put it on OSNews, a "Linux distribution that is awesome and uses Lua
> for a lot of stuff."

Sure, but writing an OS from scratch is a BIIIIIIIG  project, and I am
not sure that even the whole Lua community put together would have the
resources to undertake it. There have been cases of operating systems
written in one's pet language, like Oberon-2, but that was another
story, because they had the institutional support (and probably the
funding) of a big institution like ETH (Switzerland).
Realistically, in the case of Lua I doubt that enough people could
even be signed up for the project to take off. Unfortunately, the
recent history of operating systems is littered with corpses...

What I would really like to see is an operating environment (whatever
the kernel) which has full access to the API of the OS, including
GUIs, system functions, etc.

I had high hopes for Lua in the Haiku/OpenBeOS OS, but unfortunately
the guy who was working on the Lua bindings for the Haiku API has
recently relented his efforts, so we are still waiting for the
bindings. Anyone willing to take up the challenge? It would be a
matter of creating Lua bindings for the API's C++ classes...

Another disappointment was when the NetBSD project dropped the idea of
including Lua in their kernel, because the guy who was working on it
quit the project. Too bad.

Sergei