1. Euphoria as an OS?
- Posted by David Fulton <dave.fulton at USA.NET>
Dec 16, 1997
-
Last edited Dec 17, 1997
It seems that a few people are interested in my doings.I was going to
answer everyone personally but maybe it's better to use this
medium.Thanks especially to G.Harris and Ralf Nieuwenhuijsen for usefull
leads.
First my DOS is unusual as it's based upon a book about "Myrtle" a
32bit OS that I can personnaly recommend. I'm in Ghana at the moment and
can't lay my hand on the book as I work in London and Poland most of the
time. I altered the file operating system to create my own version of an
advanced file operating system. It always starts a new folder on a new
track and optimises the "files" sector sizes to suit the application.
This could mean creating many sectors of say 67 bytes for instsnce for a
Data Base records folder or of huge (relativly speaking) sectors for exe
files and the like.
The operating system optimises automatically during idle time and also
defrags the global layout on the disk according to a most frequently
used algorithm.
Myrtle has a rudementary shell and task management system but the
beauty of this system is all code is well documented and a few utilities
are provided as a starter.I have rewritten most of the code to suit but
there are still elements left of the original.What Myrtle really laked
was something like Euphoria to quickly develope applications.
Ralf gave me an interesting insight into the mechanism of Euphoria and
how it works. He says (I hope this is correct) that the compiler uses a
stack pointing to machine code routines. Would it be possible to hook
into the code while it is executing a machine code routine so that the
task manager does not swap out the task until that particular routine
has finnished ? This would enable the system to become re-enterant and
more suitable for a multi tasking system ?
I know this is'nt a very elegant solution but critical timing would be
done in timers anyway and the i/o routines are best done in machine code
and therefore interupts should not call upon routines in Euphoria during
their operation.
In PCW in the old days there was always monthly articles on creating
the fastest or most elegant machine code routines which were very
popular. Ralphs ideas on using Lib files looks very good to me and if we
could open up competitivly all our routines perhaps we could have a
highly optimised language and OS. Perhaps by opening up Euphoria to the
world (source code entry points for some usefull hooks) would enable a
faster developement time to a full GUI (XWINDOWS) ? and an operating
system to challenge the best.
Sorry my ramblings go on and on .........Dave.
