<story><title>Octox: Unix-like OS in Rust inspired by xv6-riscv</title><url>https://github.com/o8vm/octox</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Santosh83</author><text>Why does it seem like 80 to 90% of hobby OS projects that are started are &amp;quot;Unix-like?&amp;quot; Don&amp;#x27;t we already have a huge variety of Unix-like OSes out there? Why not explore new models?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>linguae</author><text>Through various market forces, Unix (and its descendants&amp;#x2F;clones) and Windows killed most of the rest of the OS ecosystem over 20 years ago.  There are generations of software engineers and computer scientists who’ve never studied operating systems that weren’t Unix- or Windows-based.  Most leading OS textbooks (Tanenbaum’s books, the dinosaur book, Three Easy Pieces) have a Unix slant.  Even the systems software research community is heavily Unix-centric; I say that as someone who used to be immersed in the research storage systems community.  The only non-Unix or Windows operating systems many practitioners and even researchers may have used in their lives are MS-DOS and the classic Mac OS, and there’s a growing number of people who weren’t even born yet by the time these systems fell out of common use.&lt;p&gt;However, the history of computing contains examples of other operating systems that didn’t survive the marketplace but have interesting lessons that can apply to improving today’s operating systems.  &lt;i&gt;The Unix Hater’s Handbook&lt;/i&gt; is a nice example of alternative worlds of computing that were still alive in the 1980s and early 1990s.  VMS, IBM mainframe systems, Smalltalk, Symbolics Genera, Xerox Mesa and Cedar, Xerox Interlisp-D, and the Apple Newton were all real-world systems that demonstrate alternatives to the Unix and Windows ways of thinking.  Project Oberon is an entire system developed by Wirth (of Pascal fame) whose design goal is to build a complete OS and development environment that is small enough to be understood for pedagogical purposes, similar to MINIX but without any Unix compatibility.  Reading the history of failed Apple projects such as the planned Lisp OS for the Newton and the ill-fated Pink&amp;#x2F;Taligent project are also instructive.  Microsoft Research did a lot of interesting research in the 2000s on operating systems implemented in memory-safe languages, notably Singularity and Midori.&lt;p&gt;From learning about these past projects, we can then imagine future directions for OS design.</text></comment>
<story><title>Octox: Unix-like OS in Rust inspired by xv6-riscv</title><url>https://github.com/o8vm/octox</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Santosh83</author><text>Why does it seem like 80 to 90% of hobby OS projects that are started are &amp;quot;Unix-like?&amp;quot; Don&amp;#x27;t we already have a huge variety of Unix-like OSes out there? Why not explore new models?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sneed_chucker</author><text>Because we effectively live in a Unix monoculture world, in terms of operating systems that you can actually use and study the inner workings of.&lt;p&gt;It was a legal anomaly that resulted in early Unix (aka Research Unix) being distributed with its source code for free to universities, which was enough to get the ball rolling on stuff like BSD and Lion&amp;#x27;s annotated V6 source code, that by the time AT&amp;amp;T decided that closed source commercial Unix was the game it wanted to play, the cat was already out of the bag.&lt;p&gt;By the time the free software and open source movements had gained some ground, enough people had studied or worked on some kind of Unix kernel and Userland source code that projects like Linux, Minix, and Free&amp;#x2F;Net&amp;#x2F;Open BSD were feasible. The fact that Linux running on x86 subsequently ate the world was probably something few people saw coming.&lt;p&gt;The other lineages of operating systems, e.g. Windows NT, OpenVMS, IBM&amp;#x27;s various offerings, either never have their source released or only have their source released long after they&amp;#x27;re obsolete.</text></comment>