From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-06-04T21:12:28+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby OS

On 4 Jun 2009, at 09:14, Sparky Mat wrote:
> I was considering porting the Ruby 1.9 VM to bare metal (something
> similar to Cleese - http://code.google.com/p/cleese/). I was wondering
> if someone is already working on this. The end goal is to have a Ruby
> OS, with everything running on the VM. I have yet to analyze the
> complete changes needed.

My colleague and I have been toying with a similar idea for a couple  
of years now, but we're more interested in a register-based VM than  
YARV and haven't managed to settle on one yet (if only Google would  
open-source Dalvik...).

We've also done some proof-of-concept work to see if writing a Unix  
userland in pure Ruby is possible and I'm hoping the two ideas will  
merge into something useful at some point.

 From a maintenance perspective Ruby would make for a pretty sweet  
systems programming language and assuming a build which supports ruby/ 
dl or ffi then all the functionality of C is there - or with Wilson  
even assembler.

> My original idea was for such a (Ruby) OS to be coupled with a  
> versioned
> file-system to have a completely rollback-able OS where the whole
> userland and parts of the system land are in pure Ruby, with patches
> being .diff files :-) .

The idea of a transactional file system does sound rather interesting  
- especially if it were backed by transactional memory.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
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raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason