Star Nintendo's ES Operating System
Linked by David Adams on Fri 30th Nov 2007 19:18 UTC, submitted by pablo_marx
General Development ES is a fairly interesting looking open source research OS created by Nintendo. Runs natively on x86 (and qemu of course), kernel is written in C++, uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland, uses Cairo for graphics, and even has a port of Squeak.
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RE: Why?
by meianoite on Fri 30th Nov 2007 20:19 UTC in reply to "Why?"
meianoite
Member since:
2006-04-05

Why on earth? And why using such choice of technologies?
Squeak? Javascript? FAT as filesystem? this is horrible!


Simplicity and broad adoption.

(yeah, broad adoption; Squeak is *big* at Disney.)

Doesn't seem at all like a wise choice for a next-next-gen system.


What makes you think it's a next-gen system? It's a research system. And you know what my suspicion is? That's Nintendo answer for homebrew apps on the Wii.

FAT access for the SD card: check.
Interpreted languages to sandbox the development away from the "crown jewels" (i.e., the encryption keys), and to ensure portability between the development environment and the target environment: check.
Use of a graphics library that can make great use of hardware acceleration: check.

But of course I'd rather have Lua instead of Javascript; Lua is much, *much* bigger among the game development community, so it's definitely a wiser choice. Maybe in the near future, who knows?

Sony had already too much trouble forcing developers to use Linux as developer platform and only valid devkit, so most ended up using CodeWarrior.


?!

I think you're mixing the facts here.

Apple had already too much trouble forcing users to ObjectiveC.


Uh... Noooo? The only Carbon apps you see nowadays on Mac OS X are those based on large existing codebases that started back on Mac OS 7, like those by Adobe and Microsoft, and apps ported over from Linux and use the eventual toolkit that doesn't bind to Cocoa (like Qt), but those are really few and far between (and to be honest I've never seen a single native Mac OS X app based on Qt).

Not a *single* interesting Mac OS X-exclusive app is written in Carbon.

Not going to work!


Careful, you're talking about Nintendo here. You know, that little company in Japan that simply prints money out of a little thing called Nintendo DS, as if the Wii wasn't enough? ;)


Edit: the obligatory Lua pimping ;)

Edited 2007-11-30 20:21

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