buzz wrote:
Your operating system and compiler is also pretty impressive. I printed out your website (all 50000 lines), but then my dog ate it. Can you provide it in a hardback version?
I was trying not to talk about my projects, but considering that I am right at the lattermost stages of the compiler project and virtually every other thing said relates to one or another language it is inevitable that I say things from that frame of reference.
talking about REBOL to me is like throwing a lit match at kerosene!
As both those projects are done completely from scratch you can see my perspective is that of rolling my own stuff.
the moment you use ready made things you get caught up in the dependency trap. Most of the dependency problems are pointless because if people just made everything forwards comatible then your earlier version of Xoops would run with a later version of php etc.
thankfully C and x86 are TOTALLY forwards compatible,
why cant everyone else be?
at least at the recompilation level.
offtopic from here onwards:
Ironically the Ghostscript project page shouldnt be printed out but you should navigate using the links starting at the contents table near the top. Dont even think about trying to read it from start to finish as that isnt the idea!
I continue maintaining that project for two reasons:
first I use the code myself and secondly there is a lot of interest in the project. Also I have created some really useful extensions to the project which arent in the mainstream Ghostscript.
If you are interested in the other 2 projects, email me.
The general idea of those 2 projects is to return to 1986 for the Amiga and 1978 for Unix, and create a brand new system like they did but with the hardware of today and the insights of the last 2 or 3 decades respectively.
ie instead of reimplementing, evolve.
basically return in a space ship and say nah! look and learn!
eg some fundamental changes today are that the hardware is multiprocessor and 64 bit. 64 bit memory, 64 bit registers,
64 bit drives. And that today x86 hardware is standardised and cheap. In the early days hardware was COMPLETELY UNSTANDARDISED, they even had computers which used 9-bit bytes which is why C uses octal escape codes.
when Unix was created, punched cards were cutting edge data storage, and when AmigaOS was created its floppy disks were regarded as fast and 1MB was big for a PC.
in fact Bill Gates famously said nobody would ever need more than 640K (IIRC). My god have times changed.
AmigaOS was designed to some extent around the technology of the time.
both Unix and AmigaOS are astonishing and visionary systems, both are still ahead of their time, and are COMPULSORY for anyone who wants to understand computers. (Unix in the form of Linux) Anyone who hasnt used BOTH is computer illiterate! If you have to choose between the two then choose AmigaOS as its a much richer structuring of a computer. Unix is generally structureless in some sense.
if you use both you will then realise that the Amiga shell is an evolution (towards usability) of the Unix shell.
68k itself was an evolution of x86, learning from the errors of x86. But x86 has won by globbing evolution.
Unix was created by creating a brand new language C, then coding the OS with C.
I am redoing that by creating my own brand new language and creating a brand new OS with that. and my brand new language is an evolution of C, so I am evolving at multiple levels.
my kernel however is entirely written in asm, but I will gradually migrate it to the language.
