1. Euphoria OS
- Posted by Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen <nieuwen at XS4ALL.NL>
Dec 16, 1997
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Last edited Dec 17, 1997
First I like to say hello to all the new users, there seem to be a lot new
ones now the Christmas holidays started and the outside isn't that
attractive anymore. Well, welcome to you all.
David Fulton had an idea about an new OS, using parts of Euphoria as its
kernel (Am I right?)
There is also a discussion going on about getting rid of some of the
specific built-in routines.
These two kind ideas kind of hit each other I think.
Euphoria is a stack based interpreter, which precompiles your code to a
stack replacing all routine calls to 32-bit pointers to machine code.
(Correct me if I'm wrong)
Now the built-in routines have the advantage of being called more quickly
then ASM routines, where we have to poke the arguments in, using built-in
routines. We could thus write a ASM library that works stack based like
Euphoria to gain more speed.
But why not use the same system. I'm thinking in the line of being able to
include .lib files where the routines in the .lib file included are
automatically built-in. So we could have one .lib for graphics. One for
sound, one for this, and one for that. This *would* work great. (Don't come
with something: I want to keep Euphoria pure, we're all poking up machine
code now, why not give in a bit, Robert.)
We could then also use an existing .lib file or write a custom .lib file and
use it. The routines inside the .lib could then be called at the same speed
built-in routines can be called. (which is very fast, maybe even faster than
some C compilers, I am not talking about small C compilers here. I mean, how
many of them use a stack for the argument?)
This would make disappear all problems: the weird machine poking ASM tricks
we're all doing now, the overhead of specific built-in routines like for the
mouse and graphics.
There's is only one *but*, you would be giving away the built-in routines.
(There in .LIB form)
There has to be a way around this...
Also consider its ideal usage for an OS, like David Fuller is developing.
Something like that gets a lot of potential Euphoria programmers, especially
those kind of people will recognize and value Euphoria as a generic flexible
programming language.
If you need any ideas or feedback on your OS, David Fuller, ask me, I'm
still dreaming of my dream OS, while I'm looking at my win95 taskbar (Idea
ripped of Acorn, that's an OS also)
Ralf
