

Renraku OS: Road to v1 - daeken
http://daeken.com/renraku-road-to-v1

======
shadytrees
Renraku is an operating system. More information here:
<http://daeken.com/renraku-future-os>

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ThinkWriteMute
God I hope this doesn't end up like the _Shadowrun_ Renraku D:

~~~
daeken
It won't be put in charge of any large buildings, don't worry.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Keep all children far away!

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Confusion
Every time I see a story like this, I wonder how much we are being held back
by the fact that it's hard to get several such projects to combine their
efforts. Isn't that an awful waste?

~~~
daeken
The current open source managed OSes are really very different from each
other, with only small bits of overlap. You really only have a few contenders
at the moment: SharpOS, Cosmos, and Renraku. Of those, SharpOS (GPLv3) and
Cosmos (BSD) are C#, and Renraku (CDDL) is Boo.

SharpOS's goals were never particularly clear (they seemed to be building a
full OS), but the project seems to be largely dead; they're now a part of MOSA
(I'll get to that part in a moment) though, so I'm curious to see where that
goes. Cosmos is making progress, but it's not intended as an OS, but rather a
set of components you can connect together to make your own OS. Renraku is
still fairly new (about 7 months old now, although it's fairly far along) and
is intended to be a full OS, when all is said and done.

MOSA is the Managed Operating Systems Alliance, and originally was intended to
be a compiler (JIT and AOTC) and a set of specifications for managed OSes to
work together. However, at this point they're building their own default
kernel into it. Interestingly, they're diverging greatly from the existing
managed OSes by using separate address spaces.

At this point, the field is young enough that I think the more people trying
things in different directions, the better. There are a lot of unanswered
questions, but the more approaches people try to take, the better off we'll
all be.

I will say that the primary reason that Renraku is not MOSA-based (despite me
being involved in the very early days there (although I didn't end up doing
much)) is that they're solely C#-focused, like SharpOS and Cosmos. Renraku is
pure Boo, which gives us a flexibility that's we believe to be impossible
using C#. Even though we have to do many things ourselves, we think this gives
us an advantage that will carry us through to v1 in a few months, and a usable
managed OS in 2011.

~~~
extension
_Interestingly, they're diverging greatly from the existing managed OSes by
using separate address spaces_

Doesn't that more or less defeat the purpose?

~~~
daeken
It seems to, in my mind at least. But who knows, perhaps it'll have some big
benefits. Again, the more experimentation, the better off we'll all be.

~~~
extension
I couldn't glean much from the MOSA site. They must have something else up
their sleeves for IPC.. actors?

