Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 5th Sep 2001 21:05 UTC
Today we are hosting an interview with Ville Turjanmaa, the creator of the Menuet Operating System. Menuet is a new, 32-bit OS, it fits to a single floppy (along with 10 or so more applications that come as standard with the OS). It features protection for the memory and code, it has a GUI running at 16,7 million colors, sound at 44.1 khz stereo, easy of use and easy low level API. And the most important and notable feature? The whole OS was written in 100%, pure 32-bit x86 assembly code.
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I cannot say that writing code in ASM will not give speed, but that's not where true speed comes from - Thats from choosing the correct algoritm, and profiling the code. If you look at linux, some (as mentioned on the web-page) functions are written in ASM go gain speed, such af memcpy. Writing in C is quicker, and you can focus on the algoritm and correctness. Writing in asm take longer, and if you have fixed time, I beleive that the C os, with bottleneck functions written in assembly, will be better / quicker. (A function that is only called one every second, sould not be written in assembly to gain 10% speed - thats a waste of programming time) Use the best from the two worlds and combine them. P.s (Would the OS ever be ported to the patha processor - I think not)