What if it makes me recoil in horror? screams into the void
Mind you I never said anything about quality or performance, obviously doing everything in JavaScript comes with it’s own issues but if you were to say that someone got JavaScript running in the Linux kernel as a POC I wouldn’t even be surprised
>looks inside
>node modules
Hilarious
Pretty neat, though.
> Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.
And, if so, does that mean that once the API has been bootstrapped, one could actually write an OS in js? Or are there other abstractions that would need to be migrated first?
import isOdd from "https://unpkg.com/is-odd";1) JavaScript must stay in the box (aka in the browser).
2) JavaScript as a general purpose programming language.
While I can absolutely understand 1), I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python, for local use only. After I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node. I think this shows that there are use cases here and the "default" JavaScript, aka 1), does not cover these. I do not like JavaScript, but based on my own use cases, I actually favour 2) far more than 1). So from that point of view, being able to access UEFI can also be useful. So why not.
What I find most interesting is the UEFI services binding approach. Rather than trying to abstract away the hardware, it exposes the raw EFI protocols (GraphicsOutput, SimpleFileSystem, etc.) directly to JS. That's a much more pragmatic design than trying to build a full HAL — you get to prototype UEFI applications rapidly while keeping the escape hatch to C for anything performance-critical.
Would love to see if anyone tries hooking this into UEFI's built-in network stack for PXE boot scripting. That could actually be useful beyond the novelty factor.
Seeing that Metal replaces kernel/userspace boundaries with VM protections for memory, meaning that system call overhead is eliminated, at the price of ASM/VM overhead.
What a fascinating idea. Kidding on the square...
> If this makes you grin, you are probably holding the torch.
https://medium.com/@retrage/lkl-js-running-linux-kernel-on-j...
It's also a single, self-updating executable and includes a lot in the box. Including SQLite3.
Gnome Shell and Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla Application Suite/Netscape 6+ (and Zotero[1]) are implemented on top of SpiderMonkey.
There are some (limited) ways to do so now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...
As for (1) vs (2), it’s not really an issue of JavaScript at all. The main question is, do you want to build something that runs in a browser? If you’re building a web app, you’ll have to use the sandboxed APIs (and probably JavaScript). If you don’t care about the runtime, yeah, you can use Node or Bun or Deno (or use another language altogether).
0) JavaScript must be abolished from the browser
Not implying your comment is LLM generated, clearly it isn't but asking as a genuine question.
I think he was trying to bend reality with words. I can see many apps that are running in electron on my laptop, each consuming 300MB+ (e.g. Spotify), while many other apps are written in native Swift for example, especially with the help of AI, giving the best performance possible...
Edit.
And prices of RAM nowadays...
I bet somebody has done that.
https://www.google.com/search?q=os+kernel+in+javascript
Seems like a small number of hobbyists have attempted.
I've heard of people doing this with other high level languages. Basically you need enough low level code to bootstrap a VM. Once you have that, you can make the high level language decide some logic that traditionally would be in C code, like manipulating page tables or whatever.
They are consuming 300MB of RAM because they are built on Electron and the NPM ecosystem.
Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. Punctation geeks, too! If you know what an octothorp or an interrobang are, you've probably been using em dashes for a long time.
Folks who didn't know what an em dash was by name are now experiencing the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon en masse. I've literally had to disable my "--" autocorrect just to not be accused of using an LLM when writing. It's annoying.
I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel.
The big problem is garbage collection: If I remember correctly, the fact that "any" operation can fail with an out of memory exception was a huge problem. Another problem was that random pauses for garbage collections in the kernel had major stability issues.
In short, I hope that the js kernel is for amusement and education; otherwise it would need a much more advanced garbage collector then earl 2000's .Net.
Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn. That release cycle was long delayed and they abandoned most of its ambitious projects, especially C# in the kernel, and the result was Windows Vista.
GC was not the only reason for the failure of that project. Someone could write a book about it. A lot of it was actually more about the organization of people. I also had heard from insiders that lack of ahead of time compilation was an issue. The other issue I remember hearing about was a complaint that Windows components were not layered cleanly and they ended up with circular dependencies when they tried to rewrite them.
I think it's possible to write a kernel with GC, and to still be judicious about memory usage with a GC language. And I say that as someone who happens to think that a big issue with modern software is that too many programmers are spending their whole education and career to depend on GC without thinking about it carefully. That is to say I'm already a skeptic of high-level languages and GC, but I will still afford that it is technically possible.
Note: 128GB of DRAM may add another million dollars to the build cost by 2027 at the current derivative of the $/GB curve
> Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn
Do you have any reference for that? Or are you confusing Longhorn with Singularity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)) / Midori (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system))?
I suspect you're referring to the shell/internals, though, not the kernel (https://longhorn.ms/the-reset/#:~:text=Why%20start%20over,re...)