cyclone VS aero

One of the inspirations for Rust, as I recall, was Cyclone: https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/

Which was/is a "safe" dialect of C; basically C extended with a bunch of the stuff that made it into Rust (algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, etc.) Though its model of safety is not the borrow checker model that Rust has.

Always felt to me like something like Cyclone would be the natural direction for OS development to head in, as it fits better with existing codebases and skillsets.

In any case, I'm happy to see this stuff happening in Rust.

It sounds like they re-invented Cyclone.

https://cyclone.thelanguage.org

Looks like it was a research project and is now abandoned: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org

The borrow checker is Rust's secret sauce. It's the one thing no other language has. (Except Cyclone I think, which is an unmaintained research language.)

Also, lifetimes are not the mechanism by which Rust ensures safety - it's a necessary side-effect of the approach that Rust has taken, and this has nothing to do with the issues that "plague" other languages. Region-based memory management techniques are neither new nor really innovative. https://cyclone.thelanguage.org/, which directly inspired Rust, had them, and the authors gave up working on it because the ergonomics were terrible, as is the case with Rust. Lifetimes are needed for the Rust compiler to reason about what it can reasonably allow at compile time, but it, along with the Borrow Checker (which provides the actual safety net) ensures that whole swathes of valid programs are disallowed because the Rust compiler is not smart enough (and probably never will be) to check that these programs are valid.

This feels like an ad; the blog post and the README feel like they were written to sound complicated and smart rather than tell the whole truth. Like, "On boot, the kernel has full access to the memory and is allowed to write where it should not (its own code, for example)"? Apart from the fact that ring 0 will always have full control, the MMU also exists. Also, the "48k" (the kernel has 34324 lines of non-comment code, the rest are in the other repos I assume) LOC are obvious when you consider code like src/syscall/mod.rs:717 is present.

To be fair, this is impressive, but its a basic monolithic kernel written for a school project, with the "twist" that it is in Rust and uses Linux syscalls.

For anyone who is interesting in more Rust UNIX-like kernels, Aero (https://github.com/Andy-Python-Programmer/aero) is farther ahead supports running quite a lot of recompiled Linux userspace, including dwm and WebKit.

https://github.com/Andy-Python-Programmer/aero/blob/master/src/aero_kernel/src/mem/paging/addr.rs especially obvious, if you look at the first version of this file:

There is progress in implementing the DRM subsystem (cc https://github.com/Andy-Python-Programmer/aero/blob/master/src/aero_kernel/src/drivers/drm/mod.rs) but currently it only implements a small portion of the subsystem. But yea, this was one of the blocking points.

Get him to join the OSDev discord chat. Most of the people there started learning programming in the middle of the pandemic and are now building complex projects. Group is mostly kids his age, 12-16 year olds, learning to hack around. Like this 13 year old or this 15 year old.

you can compare with initial commit: https://github.com/Andy-Python-Programmer/aero/commit/3ee1c052454a1386dc8d1688b5ca9d616e3a907b