Submitted by Discerning techies probably know of the the programming language occam, designed for the Inmos Transputer highly parallel processor from the 1980s. It’s not so widely-known that occam is still around and available for the x86 in the form of the Kent Retargetable occam Compiler, KRoC – nor that there’s an entire PC OS, complete with GUI, written in occam-pi: RMoX.
RMoX is written and developed for the PC/104+ range of embedded devices, but since these use a fairly standard set of chips, it is possible to use RMoX on a standards-compliant desktop computer as well. The operating system can also be built as a normal application, mostly for testing purposes. This is the feature list given on the main page:
- Massively concurrent design with lightweight process scheduling.
- Multiprocessor support for MP 1.4 compatible platforms.
- Device drivers for a range of standard hardware.
- PCI and USB support.
- Loadable module support.
- User-mode support.
Thanks to a set of pre-built binary images, you can easily run RMoX on Qemu for testing purposes. You can download it from the project’s download page.
I know the GUI isn’t the be all and end all of OSs, but none-the-less I’m loving the LCARS* theme used in this OS
* The interface used on Star Trek TNG / Deep Space 9 / Voyager computers.
The LCARS theme looked familiar but I couldn’t place it. Seeing that, I have to try the OS just for fun.
Interesting projects like this is why I visit OSAlert.
Me too, even though I have no knowledge about os design the theme alone makes me want to try it.
Now, all we need here is a little touch screen support and some “Engage” button…
You can call me maaaad, but I love such initiatives in our IT world. Thanks to that, it’s not boring after all that hours spent at work. Great and really interesting.
It’s really good to see these new OSs coming along, written in languages other than C.
This reminds me of “House”, the OS written in Haskell – here’s a link to that –
http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/
There’s also Kinetic – another Haskell-based OS –
http://www.ninj4.net/kinetic/
I’ve wondered in the past if it would be possible to write an OS in Python or Ruby. Given that it is possible in Haskell, I’d imagine the answer would be “yes”. I’d love to see someone do it!
The design is very similar to the Singularity project at Microsoft Reseach. Basically, a micro kernel with languages based protection.