Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware.
A massive documentation pass has also taken place, fixing various errors and improving and simplifying the writing. More programs have been ported, of course, and various lower-level improvements and fixes, along with a number of other fixes and changes across the operating system.
I still don’t get why I should be interested in Redox. There’s dozens of operating systems like it. It’s made in Rust, okay, so what?
j0scher,
Naturally not everyone cares about programming languages, least of all the end users who don’t know anything about vulnerabilities. But since many of us in the industry have been critical of unsafe languages like C for a long time, developing new operating systems in safe languages is an important milestone to evolving beyond C.
Clearly new operating systems still face major challenges, including building support and achieving critical mass. But if we’re ever going to evolve, then some people need to take the first step and I believe Redox are filling that role.
Redox might have a competitor. There is this firm Microsoft who are writing an operating system in Rust which I gather existed before in legacy languages. I can’t see this so-called Windows catching on, personally.