[geocar]

It's not done yet.

This summer, Pierre and I got kOS to boot directly into g (the graphical interface; formally called z) with ISR, keymap, modesetting, basic filesystem, etc weighing in around 100 lines of C. That was pretty exciting. Could probably be done with less with some deeper changes to Arthur's code, but it's still very useful to run k under Linux. Oleg made a silly little game in kOS.

Arthur and Oleg did some performance benchmarks staging k against q (current kdb+), Postgres, some "popular RDBMS" (that I can't name), and MongoDB. It was impressive that k is so much faster than q, but it also really underscores the cost of the wrong data structure (and how hard it is to get the right one with SQL or MongoDB).

[DennisP]

How much are you planning to opensource?

I realize you have a thriving commercial software company and that's cool. But...wow. This is exactly the sort of thing Alan Kay's team has been working on for the past five years, and you guys seem to be beating them to it, with a completely different approach. It would be pretty amazing to be able to dig into it, find out how the whole system works, and contribute.

[geocar]

I'm not actually employed by kx, so I can't say for certain.

I don't think Arthur's opposed to open sourcing bits though.

[reedlaw]

Would it run under Kona? [1]

1. https://github.com/kevinlawler/kona

[geocar]

No. A lot of the verbs have changed in k.

[chippy]

so would it work if Kona changed?

[scottlocklin]

Kona is K3. K5, the subject of the article, is being invented now. I'm quite certain there is no plan to make Kona K5 compatible.

[mwcampbell]

What hardware is your team currently targeting with kOS? An x86 virtual machine under something like VirtualBox seems to be a popular choice among developers of alternative operating systems, since it's a way of avoiding the diversity of PC hardware and the need for lots of drivers. So are you doing that? Or sticking to things that are pretty well standardized but outdated, like IDE and VGA as opposed to SATA and modern GPUs? Or are you targeting a particular subset of PC hardware?

[geocar]

Arthur, Oleg and Pierre use Asus UX31A; I have a MBA. I did the first kernel in qemu, but Pierre got an EFI boot going with Intel modesetting pretty quickly.

I'm more interested in smaller devices though (ARM, etc).

[mwcampbell]

So is a laptop like the UX31A or the MBA actually usable as a laptop with kOS yet? I imagine power management is going to be complicated to implement, if you haven't gotten to that yet.

> I'm more interested in smaller devices though (ARM, etc).

Yes. I imagine a smartphone with a very low-power processor and a couple orders of magnitude less RAM than the mainstream models could have very impressive battery life.

[keithpeter]

Quote from OA

"Whitney sent Oleg and Pierre some of the C code he was working on, and notes on a problem he didn’t know how to solve. They emailed back a solution, coded in his style."

Did Pierre and Oleg think their solution out in standard code first and then make it Whitney-like, or did they find themselves thinking in Whitneyese straight away? I imagine their teacher may have noticed Whitney tendencies and that is what led to the original encouragement to make contact.

[geocar]

I do not think they code in what you call "standard code", but I don't know how "straight away" it was either.

Writing in a dense fashion facilitates thinking about the solution.

[keithpeter]

"Writing in a dense fashion facilitates thinking about the solution."

What I was thinking, thanks