General Development Archive

So, you want to write an operating system. We discussed earlier a generic set of considerations that are important, from my experience, for this type of adventure. We proceed to look at solutions to the problem of actually getting started with writing your system: how to do it when you know you don't know what you're doing, making it work before making it work fast, and what to do when things go wrong.

Prologue by the editor-in-chief: "A bit more than two years ago, while I was still serving at BeNews, I asked Jeremy Friesner to write an article and present his cross-platform client-server messaging system for dynamic distributed applications, MUSCLE. Two weeks later, he came back to me with a multi-page article, explaining MUSCLE. To demonstrate the power of MUSCLE, Jeremy created a demo application based on it. The result was BeShare.

"Borland Software Corporation today announced Borland Delphi 7 Studio, featuring full support for new and emerging Web Services, integrated model driven development, and preview capabilities for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Using Delphi 7 Studio, the estimated one million Delphi developers can begin developing their skills for .NET and preparing applications for .NET without abandoning their existing work and skills on the Windows platform." Read the rest of the press release at Borland USA.

"Beginners to the .NET Framework sometimes have a hard time trying to understand the classes in the System.IO namespace for performing input/output (IO) operations. The difficulty stems from the fact that this namespace is relatively large, containing more than 40 members, some of which are similar classes that can be used to achieve the same tasks. Thus it is sometimes hard to figure out which class is best for which task. This article tries to make your life a bit easier by grouping IO tasks into three categories and introducing the classes that are suitable for each task category." Read the developer's article at O'Reilly.

GCC 3.1.1 has just been released. This release is a bug fix release relative to GCC 3.1. The next release of GCC will be GCC 3.2. This release will be available very soon (within days or a week). The only changes in GCC 3.2 relative to GCC 3.1.1 will be changes to the C++ ABI.

Borland Software Corp is set to build on an early lead among Linux developers, with today's expected launch of a C++ rapid application development (RAD) environment. Scotts Valley, California-based Borland will announce version 3.0 of its Kylix RAD environment for C++. Previous versions of Kylix targeted Delphi programmers on Windows and Linux. Read the rest of the report at TheRegister.

"Developing the Graphical User Interface (GUI) for a Python application is often a tedious, time-consuming, and opaque process. This is the exact opposite of how Python programmers would describe most other aspects of software development using Python. So what is it about GUI applications that causes them to be so hard?" Read the technical article at OnLamp. Two more Python articles can be found at developerWorks at IBM, here and here.

Jared White over at The Idea Basket has published an interview with Erik J. Barzeski, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Cocoa Dev Central. In the interview they discuss the history of the Cocoa programming environment, the importance of Cocoa vs. Carbon within the Mac development community, and how vital Cocoa is to Apple and the Mac platform.

Not everyone's happy with the default look and feel of MacOSX. So the Unsanity LLC guys have come to fullfil feature requests from many MacOSX users. They have written applications that are basically "hacks" (Unsanity prefers the word "haxies"), that they change MacOSX, sometimes in a pretty fundamental way. We tested three of their products, Fruitmenu, WindowShadeX and Xounds.

libferris is a virtual filesystem (VFS) that runs in the user address space. This means that applications using libferris will use the shared libraries API to access the filesystem which may then delegate to the kernel using libc to perform the desired actions. Operating in the user address space allows libferris to mount things that one would generally not want the kernel to mount. For example libferris mount Berkeley database files, ftp sites, XML files, rpm files, sockets, sysv IPC, mysql databases and remote computers using ssh as a filesystem.

If there was a single application making someone use MacOSX full time, that application would be Watson. This application is possibly the most awarded in the MacOSX world, and it is the best idea for an application that I saw the last few years. Despite the idea being dead simple, and even seem redundant at first, Watson is an excellent, original and handy tool. I would like to initiate an open source project for a multi-platform clone of Watson (Karelia say that they have no plans for any ports - with only a remote possibility for a Windows port). I will start by putting $100 USD on the table while readers are most welcome to co-sponsor the project as well. What we really need though, is willing and capable C++ developers.

The article provides an in-depth look at the thread pool support in the Microsoft .NET Framework, shows why you need a pool and the implementation provided in .NET, and includes a complete reference for its use in your applications.

"The next thing that any one should know after learning to make a boot sector and before switching to protected mode is, how to use the BIOS interrupts. BIOS interrupts are the low level routines provided by the BIOS to make the work of the Operating System creator easy. This part of the article would deal with BIOS interrupts." This is the second part of the series of articles on how to write your own toy OS.

"LynxOS v4.0, the newest release of the POSIX-conformant hard real-time operating system (RTOS), has support for Linux ABI compatibility -- where Linux application binaries can run unchanged in the LynxOS environment without necessitating source code recompilation. This white paper examines the issues surrounding ABI compatibility in general and describes the architecture of the Linux ABI compatibility layer on LynxOS v4.0." Read the article at LinuxDevices.