Re: Lua OS

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 05:19, sergei karhof <karhof21@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

I've always wanted to see an "OS" written in Lua, which in reality
might just be a Linux kernel with a Lua interface and apps written in
Lua. Think something like Android but better. I'm often annoyed by the
difficulty of scripting what should be simple tasks with a modern UI.

Writing an actual OS kernel in Lua would be an interesting project,
and certainly not impossible. You'd need some C glue code to bootstrap
the kernel, talk to hardware, etc, but most of the logic could be done
in Lua. It's something I've considered doing as a fun project, even
though it's not likely to take off. :-)

Bogdan has the right idea, though: existing OSes benefit from having
all those drivers already available, and you'd be better off taking
advantage of that.

-- 
Sent from my toaster.