Mu: A Human-Scale Computer

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • mu

    Soul of a tiny new machine. More thorough tests → More comprehensible and rewrite-friendly software → More resilient society. (by akkartik)

  • If you're interested in playing with Mu, there's a guided tour where I try to make the process as painless as possible: https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/tutorial/index.md

  • mirage

    MirageOS is a library operating system that constructs unikernels

  • From my skim of the README this sounds like (in part) a system for generating unikernels, is that correct?

    Would anybody like to compare/contrast this with https://mirage.io/?

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

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  • teliva

    Fork of Lua 5.1 to encourage end-user programming

  • It's hard. Building Mu has given me more of a flavor for just how hard it is. Some limitations of Mu:

    * It still requires firmware. There's a whole lot of C down there. How deep do you want to go?

    * No mouse. This is just my own ignorance. I can't get the damn IRQs and interrupts figured out.

    * Doesn't work yet on real hardware. I live in Qemu. Debugging that is a whole new set of skills I need to learn.

    * No networking, almost no persistent storage. Mu has a very simple and slow driver for ATA disks, but that probably won't suffice on most real-world machine configurations. There's 0 network drivers right now. I probably need a dozen to get any sort of coverage.

    The stuff you mentioned around graphics and OS file dialogs, that feels easier once you're willing to put up with constraints like Mu's 1024x768 and so on. But yeah, there's major challenges on this road.

    Partly due to these challenges, I've actually started to hedge my bets and make some compromises. My new project is https://github.com/akkartik/teliva which doesn't try to eliminate C, just minimize it. Linux kernel, libc, Lua (12k lines of C), some libraries for https. A gemini client is actually on my todo list there. I think I have everything I need to build it.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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