- Serenity (https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity) - not really a small team, but it managed to get to GUI as pretty much a one-man-show
- Skift (https://github.com/skift-org/skift)
- hhu: https://github.com/hhuOS/hhuOS
- MaxOS: https://github.com/maxtyson123/MaxOS
- MorphiOS: https://github.com/syedtaqi95/morphiOS
- Macaron: https://github.com/MacaronOS/Macaron
- Ghost: https://github.com/maxdev1/ghost
most big ones in C don't manage to get to the GUI level, except toaruos: https://github.com/klange/toaruos
Axle[2] is a one-man project with a GUI that the author has been gradually transitioning from C to Rust.
Among C++ projects, I think Essence[3] also merits a mention.
[0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/223746/why-is-the-l...
Until Rust in 2010, there basically was almost no motion in the "system programming space". Even afterward, there needs to be enough uptake to actually have critical mass. Only then can people start using it for projects.
Side note: D actually predates a lot of this by being from 2001, but, sadly, never seemed to get any traction. It seems like it had the misfortune of being about 10 years too early and that programmers just weren't ready for a new systems programming language at that point.
I was only a kid starting my university degree at that time, but I had been coding since I was 9 and I was very excited about D. What I remember is that getting it up and running was a cumbersome, fully manual process. The compiler was closed-source, delivered as a tarball without any kind of installation script, ditto for the libraries. I wrote some little programs and I liked the language, but in the end I gave up.
On the other hand, Rust has rustup and Cargo which are just amazing. I am sure that a big part of Rust's popularity comes from Cargo.
The two counter-examples I can think of with plain C:
* GTK+, though honestly speaking I think quality has dipped over the decades where C++ equivalents have flourished.
* Old school Win32 style. Counter to the bad reputation, I find it easy to be productive with in plain C once you adjust your mental model to its expectations. Though it's probably better from C++ than C, for a few convenience features to reduce boiler plate.
It’s popular to dunk on OOP and its concepts nowadays, but I think that languages that straight away shun them because “OOP sucks” are an example of their authors overreacting to OOP’s dominance back in 1990s-early 2000s and tendencies to shove OOP into every nook and cranny, with a notion that if you don’t do it, or do not enough of it, your solution is inferior.
Holy hell. Linux kernel is object-oriented. Because it’s damn convenient for a lot of things.
I don't have a boot manager, my OS is multiboot compatible, so I can boot with qemu's multiboot support or PXElinux, or grub or whatever. IMHO, with the multiboot standard, there's no need to write a boot loader if you want to build an OS, and no need to write an OS if you want to build a boot loader.
Looks like this OS has a good selection of storage drivers, so should be good to go there.
It's interesting to consider "what next" once an OS project reaches this stage. There are soo many directions a team can take, but also, none of those direction lead to a clear path towards massive user adoption.
There are obvious holes/gaps in what mainstream OSes offer today, however it is not clear how a project goes from here to addressing those gaps, and even if those were to be addressed, it is not clear how it could displace mainstream OSes.
We are clearly better off having projects like this, that give us options in case something were to go horribly wrong with mainstream OSes. However, what is the incentive to keep projects like this alive when the path ahead is soo unclear?
How does one disrupt the operating systems market?
someone is going to come on here and tell me we already have this (i hope).
ive been out of computing for so long i dont know if this reliably exists, but back in the day this is what i would have wished for.
suppose i could build my own
am i looking at building a rack mounted system? heh, think i just found a project for myself.
1 psu, 1 gpu (for gaming), 1 kb/monitor, 2 hdd, 2 motherboards, 1 kvm switch, build my own rack out of wood, done! so the only extra cost really should be the 2nd motherboard and the kvm switch.
Managarm: August 2022 Update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32515546 - Aug 2022 (3 comments)
The Managarm Operating System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24689727 - Oct 2020 (1 comment)
