I wonder if Haiku could become the foundation for a new os. Haiku but based on Rust. It would be a match made in heaven, Haiku's secret sauce is the asyncness of the API. This was doable in C++ however Rust and haiku are a wombo combo!
Having programmed in the BeOS API long ago, and now a BEAM language developer, I noticed that basically they were implementing a crude and unsafe actor model. There must be modern libraries that provide that at a lower level than say the erlang VM, but with better safety guarantees than C++.
Actix[0] is probably what you're looking for. I don't think the actors in Actix are network transparent, though, which is a bummer for distributed applications, but wouldn't matter for an OS.
Obsessive type safety in my opinion is a bit silly, it stems from this thought that you can squeeze out every possible runtime error by defensively coding. The truth is, you can't; there are going to be language errors, os errors, driver errors, and errant cosmic rays. Designing for resilience is not solved by typing, and an obsessive typing pattern can create a false sense of security.
Bah, I've seen runtime errors with dynamic and strict typing, and I'll take type safety any day. Besides, good type systems like Rust's force you to think about all sorts of errors at all points of the program. It's harder to write, but it's harder to break, and much, much easier to fix.
have you ever programmed in a BEAM language like erlang or elixir? It's easy to write, when there are errors, most of the time it's "no big deal". If something that is outside of your control (someone else's code, or hardware, or a driver, etc) then it's often not a fatal problem. Pushing errors to the edge is great, but "forcing you to think about all sorts of errors", I think is an antipattern. You should code the happy path, anticipate the 80% errors, patch the next 19% error, and ignore the last tiny sliver of errors, and generally be able to refactor easily.
Of course your environment should be able to survive and persist 99.99999% of errors, that's critical... there should be no throw()s or panic()s.
Well Zircon (Fuchsia's kernel) doesn't have any Rust code inside of it; it's C++. Parts of rust code used in Fuchsia can be found in the Garnet layer and it is just one of the languages that can interface with the OS via the FIDL (Fuchsia Interface Definition Language) [0][1]. An example of this is a tool written in Rust that communicates with parts of the bluetooth stack[2]. The network stack is also using it and is written in Go. [3]
From the technical side, maybe. From the user side they could not be more different. BeOS was the ultimate power user OS. You had a lot of power, but also responsibility. It included many features like the novel filesystem that more pragmatic OSes didn't include.
Fuchsia, as far as I can see, is the ultimate "modern" OS. While very safe, it will be very locked down, in the tradition of iOS, Android, Secure Boot, HTML5+js etc. but "done right". There will probably be a lot of things I won't be able to do with a Fuchsia phone.
Are you sure? While its open source, your phone won't be (since the OS is MIT licensed, your OEM won't have to give you anything). Can you build a custom ROM without kernel sources?
This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the software, though. You can easily lock down linux for a given phone if that’s your goal (at face value anyway).
I appreciate what you are saying. So many people assume that open source gives them the keys of the castle, while later they realize that a simple broadcom closed source driver puts the whole openess in the trash.
I've been happily buying Nexus and Pixel phones for as long as they've existed, on which you can easily unlock the bootloader and build your own ROM if you want. I don't see why Google would stop doing that just because they've released a new OS.
If you're concerned about installing your own software on your own hardware, why not buy it from a manufacturer that protects your freedom to be able to do so?
I (not having looked at the architecture yet) have a suspicion that Fuchsia will run on a hardware-independent layer, like Treble which they're pushing right now.
They seem fundamentally different. Fuschia is realtime and, I think, engineered toward embedded and mobile at the moment. Redox is more about cleaning up unix (that’s my impression, anyway). If you squint, it’s like qnx vs linux/bsd, I guess.
Does Fuchsia use Rust at all? Because if not, it should. It seems like a wasted opportunity not to preempt tens of thousands of future memory corruption bugs over the next few days for a brand new OS by not using Rust.
It would have looked a lot like PalmOS 6, a/k/a PalmOS Cobalt. Palm bought Be's assets -- and many of their engineers -- when the company failed, and built their next generation PalmOS around it. For reasons as much due to internal politics as anything technical, though, they never shipped any Cobalt-based phones.
IIRC there are native rust bindings for syscalls. The syscalls themselves are implemented in C++. I have no idea about the user space, but my impression is that rust is a first level language for things like the ui.
EDIT: it looks like they have interface generators for their APIs, which includes rust support as a first class citizen.
There’s a nice Stanford class I took called CS 140E that had students write an OS for the Raspeberry Pi in Rust. There are actually some benefits to using Rust at this level, though it can be a bit cumbersome at times.
Have you tried it? My experience is that it works pretty well, though I've mostly been working on toys. Even bigger projects like Redox have shown that you generally don't need very much unsafe.
If you've written any amount of Rust then that's provably not true. You've no doubt used functions & methods that use unsafe (somewhere down along the line), and you didn't need to deal with it. That's 'wrapping unsafe code' used in practice. You got to write safe because someone else wrote the unsafe wrapper.
> Rustc memory usage on Linux is also high, but it never runs out of memory. I would like to figure out the cause of this issue.
Strange. I hope this isn't simply a case of wildly over-committing memory and getting away with it on Linux. But then I guess the bsd folks would have is yes too?
In order to parallelize the build process at the rustc-llvm codegen boundary, Cargo has to implement some orchestration between compiler processes (using jobserver-rs [1]) so that 10 rustc processes didn't all create 10 threads and codegen units each and blow up the system. I'm guessing that memory quotas are a part of that implementation.
For others who like me have a hard time keeping track of which OS is what...
"Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful."
Serious question - does anyone use Haiku for anything more than playing?
I was a huge BeOS fan back in the day, and bought the Intel version when I had a Pentium ][ computer. I was so excited for OpenBeOS (now Haiku) after BeOS got acquired, but it's been something 17 years, and it looks they're still just a release candidate for 1.0.
Back then, BeOS did some amazing stuff compared to Windows, but technology has come a long way since then, and I'd rather be using MacOS, Windows or a Linux Desktop like Ubuntu than Haiku.
Right now they’re focused mostly on parity with BeOS R5 in terms of features/capabilities. Once that goal has been reached, the focus will shift to making Haiku a proper modern OS and addition of new features in the spirit of BeOS. I suspect that it’ll become much more interesting to a wider variety of people after a release or two with the latter focus.
The one thing that makes Haiku intriguing and promising in my eyes is the fact that its developers want it to be a first class desktop/laptop OS above all else with no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water. There’s nothing like that out there today, save for maybe macOS (which is more desktop focused but still suffers from the various multipurpose compromises brought from its *NIX heritage).
"no server/mobile/other kitchen-sink-isms muddying the water"
I'm not convinced that at present this is a meaningful benefit especially compared to the increased resources available for say linux. The one good example that I can think of cpu schedulers seems to be solved by running a kernel with alternative patches.
The benefit would be the ability to cherry pick only the most desktop-beneficial features rooted in non-desktop domains while also leaving behind the rest. One example would be the window server and compositor — on Linux/BSD, these services, being desktop oriented on a multipurpose system, must be wholly decoupled from the rest of the system introducing a ton of opportunities for latency, stutter, and other issues to find their way into the user experience. It’s not impossible to minimize these issues, but it’s much more difficult.
Haiku doesn’t have to worry about this problem at all. It can simply implement the most effective and good-experience-conducive end to end design possible for its window management and compositing since it’ll never ever be a headless server.
Kinda I suppose, except without many of the limits inherent to those platforms. Both probably still aren’t as good as they could be for their purposes due to baggage inherited from their *NIX predecessors.
I have it on a few older laptops that I keep around for traveling - I don't care if they're stolen, and I only need them for SSH and a browser.
Haiku runs circles around Ubuntu MATE on these devices; it may seem equivalent on benchmarks, but the UI just _feels_ much zippier and apps load quickly.
> Serious question - does anyone use Haiku for anything more than playing?
Doubtful. After seeing a few Haiku posts over the past few days I downloaded it and gave it a try. There's a lot of promise, but it's pretty darn glitchy (e.g. DHCP client works occasionally, mail client sees mailboxes but doesn't fetch messages).
I'm in the opposite camp though. I'd love to find a viable alternative to macOS.
Those two things plus the web browser are indeed the glitchiest parts of the system :)
I've finally found a consistent way to reproduce the DHCP glitches, so I might be able to spend some time debugging that. The mail client is another issue; for now you're probably better off avoiding it. (There are third-party mail apps in the depot, so maybe try one of those?)
Glad to hear you can see the potential, though! :)
I see it too, but am honestly quite sceptical it'll get there in time. Development is just plain slow, which isn't surprising with the comparatively low number of devs. It feels half the man power is "wasted" on just keeping up with new hardware. By the time haiku is done, i fear desktop pcs and laptops will be extinct. I liked beos so I was really thrilled when openbeos popped up. I download the latest haiku build every other year or so, but it just feels they are all the same.
Apparently a few of the devs use it full time. I've tried it out a few times, it's really very responsive, but it lacks a lot of useful software and hardware support. If you have the right hardware for it and a relatively limited set of application needs, it might work.
Some of us developers use it almost full-time (I don't quite yet, but I've finally gotten WiFi working on this PC so hopefully I will do so shortly), and there are users in the community that do also.
You can pretty much put all other applications support on hold. If you get modern web browsing that opens up so many web apps. WebPositive is a joke. Otter isn't quite stable.
What chipset is that? I just merged new drivers for the Intel PRO wireless chipsets and Intel "Dual Band" chipsets; so if it's one of those it might work out of the box now.
> a modern web browser
Well, WebPositive can play YouTube and mostly works on major sites ... but yes, this is a difficult problem.
Sometimes we get new Linux distributions (I know Haiku isn't that), a language I've kinda heard of, or something, and i'll go to their site... I still don't even know what I'm looking at.
This is exciting -- Rust has already shown great results through its implementation in Firefox (made me dump Chrome for Quantum)[0], so building a whole new operating system using the language makes perfect sense -- a great test bed for the language, imo.
And given the fact that Haiku OS team's goal is to build a 'unified' and well-fused OS for personal use [1], using a single language should greatly help with reducing complexity and improving robustness.
Haiku is written in C++, as are most of its utilities I imagine. I don't see them redoing all that effort for such trivial gain. They're just talking about tooling and language bindings for people developing applications for Haiku.