One aspect that makes Rust more suitable for low-level systems is the flexibility in memory management. For example, they have several different kinds of pointers that have different ways to manage their life cycle.
On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 2:10:31 PM UTC-5, Stefan Karpinski wrote: > > People have certainly written OSes in some unusual languages (Lisp, > Haskell), but I have to say that using such a dynamic language with > automatic garbage collection strikes me as not the best endeavor. Since > Julia Evans (the blog post author) has dabbled in both Julia and Rust, you > could maybe ask her why she chose Rust for her OS project, rather than > Julia. > > > On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Collin Glass > <[email protected]<javascript:> > > wrote: > >> Thanks John and Johan. I get it. >> >> >> On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 10:55:31 AM UTC-4, Johan Sigfrids wrote: >>> >>> I'm no expert on writing OSes but without an OS you have no memory >>> management, so no heap. I don't think Julia's memory model would work. >>> There is a reason OS kernels are written in C. You need a language which >>> lets you read and write directly to memory addresses. If you want something >>> better than C to write a kernel in I think Rust is low level enough to give >>> you what you want. >>> >>> On Wednesday, March 19, 2014 4:37:22 PM UTC+2, Collin Glass wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi All, >>>> >>>> I am new to Julia, although already addicted :). My imagination does >>>> outweigh my understanding for now but I wanted to know why it wouldn't be >>>> possible to right an Operating System, or at least a very small one in >>>> Julia. Noted by Tim holy in this post: https://groups.google. >>>> com/forum/#!searchin/julia-users/gui/julia-users/PakwjAB- >>>> 14s/tEpBkGf-KgwJ >>>> >>>> I was looking around a little bit before finding that post and I found >>>> this dated package: https://github.com/toivoh/julia-kernels >>>> >>>> I contacted Toivo and he said the package was likely dated now and >>>> pointed me to devectorized Julia code to do this: https://github.com/ >>>> lindahua/Devectorize.jl >>>> >>>> My vision is to write something equivalent to this to start: >>>> http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/03/12/the-rust-os-story/ >>>> >>>> My first question is can it be done? If it can then I want to open up >>>> this feed to discussions on the design. Or maybe if it can't, will this >>>> ever be in the scope of Julia. >>>> >>>> Any resources or rants would be great! >>>> >>> >
