Until now, I’ve been juggling SerenityOS as a side project while also having a full time programming job.
That all changes today! I just wrapped up my last day at work, and I’m no longer employed. Instead, I will be focusing on SerenityOS full time starting right now! :^)
This is all made possible by the extremely generous support I’m receiving from folks via Patreon, GitHub Sponsors and PayPal! I feel super fortunate to have the trust & support of so many people. Thank you all so much!!
SerenityOS is amazing, and its main developer seems to be a delightful person, whose character and demeanor is attracting a lot of interesting developers to the project. The progress it’s making is astonishing, and with this news, that progress is bound to keep steady for a long time to come. Since pretty much all the alternative, small operating systems from the early 2000s died out, it’s heartwarming to see a new one pop up and thrive.
I thought it was not open sourced?
It’s open source from the start.
I am sorry! It is 100% my mistake, I was mixing up SerenityOS with SingularityOS, again the mistake is all mine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
SingularityOS seems very refreshing. Pity it was parked. A managed (whatever that means), tight, fluff-less OS for bottom up bespoke applications would have been a good thing. Even better if it was successful enough to generate lots of drivers, non X86 versions and an open source anti-product. SerenityOS is cute but does not seem to be targeting such a focused opposite niche to mainstream.. It was interesting that our favorite TempleOS was listed in the Wiki article as a similar OS to Singularity.
If you listen to his videos, the goal of SerenityOS isn’t to replace your desktop, its a project to build a totally integrated OS ala MacOS. It may eventually run on real hardware but for now building everything from the ground up and integrating it is the goal.
lapx432,
Using a managed language to provide the isolation in an operating system without needing hardware based isolation is an awesome idea. I used to discuss it here with neolander even before we had ever heard of singularity. Managed languages already provide a lot of the safety mechanisms needed to keep the code from corrupting it’s own process space.
I think we could do ever better today with the advancement of languages with compile time safety checks protecting against run time errors. It would be awesome to see a fully open OS making use of these techniques using strong compile time checks. It could prove to be much safer than a monolithic kernel while still being more efficient than a microkernel.
We could built it, but the barriers to mainstream adaption are enormous.