[kingcharles]

I did this in the mid-90s when this book came out:

https://www.amazon.com/Developing-32-Bit-Operating-System-Cd...

I knew x86 well from demo scene coding, and I had the Linux and NetBSD sources to help, but the hardest bit was just getting all the boot sector stuff going properly and getting the processor into 386 mode as soon as possible.

I wrote an entire OS that booted into a windowed GUI, multi-threaded, file system support etc, etc and my goal was the whole thing booting happily to the desktop in 4Mb of RAM from a 1.44Mb 3.5" floppy, which it did. Every line was written from scratch in x86 assembler, because I was a masochist like that.

I called it Tinkerbell, for reasons lost to time, and it was hosted at tinkerbell.org back when I owned that domain. I just checked archive.org but sadly they didn't grab it when it was around.

EDIT: 32-bit OS book and the source are here:

http://www.ipdatacorp.com/mmurtl/

[JPLeRouzic]

Hey, I remember looking at your operating system in the 90'. I do not remember where I find it. It's nice to read about it today.

[vendiddy]

Very cool!

Do you have insight into why modern operating systems consume gigabytes of disk space and require so many system resources?

[native_samples]

Because they do a lot more? The video demo is the happy path. It's perhaps hard to notice things like the image viewer supporting drawing things on the image but not supporting saving the resulting file, or the lack of alt-tab.

Also, Essence is basically a Win32-like system (with some very small use of C++ but e.g. using char* instead of std::string). The kernel is handling graphics and the windowing system, like it used to do in Windows. Even the eyedropper you saw has kernel mode support.

https://gitlab.com/nakst/essence/-/blob/master/kernel/window...

Yes you can get very efficient code this way but only at a cost of low programmer productivity / reliability / security, especially as the code scales up to more than one developer. For a hobby OS it doesn't matter. For a commercial OS it's not good enough, hence Apple/Microsoft's investment in .NET and Swift. These consume more resources but make it easier for programmers to avoid mistakes and work together.

Don't get me wrong. I'm loving the style, the panache, the clean code, the ambition. Fantastic project. But it's a bit naive to ask "why can't all operating systems be like that?". Operating systems written by one guy will inevitably be fast and light compared to an OS that's 30 years old and which has 10,000x the number of features (at a conservative guess).