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I don't know if it's only me, but did this guy... Did this guy make a huge mistake?

I think he was trying to bend reality with words. I can see many apps that are running in electron on my laptop, each consuming 300MB+ (e.g. Spotify), while many other apps are written in native Swift for example, especially with the help of AI, giving the best performance possible...

Edit.

And prices of RAM nowadays...

I'm doing my part ∠(‘-‘)

Whoa, I haven not been following ASM.js stuff in any detail.

Seeing that Metal replaces kernel/userspace boundaries with VM protections for memory, meaning that system call overhead is eliminated, at the price of ASM/VM overhead.

What a fascinating idea. Kidding on the square...

Thank you for the reminder to do my yearly viewing of that video lol

Talking about quotes, I also absolutely loved this note at the end of the readme:

> If this makes you grin, you are probably holding the torch.

You don't need a JS bootloader to write an OS in JS. The bootloader just drops the machine into some memory address for it to start executing your OS init script. that bit could be a Javascript interpreter. You can't do much with the architecture in Javascript though, because it doesn't allow you to map memory directly to your types (unless there's some ungodly nonesense I'm not aware of) so you'll have to drop into C/asm to e.g. interact with the ports/registers/tables to set up userspace.

> And, if so, does that mean that once the API has been bootstrapped, one could actually write an OS in js?

I bet somebody has done that.

https://www.google.com/search?q=os+kernel+in+javascript

Seems like a small number of hobbyists have attempted.

I've heard of people doing this with other high level languages. Basically you need enough low level code to bootstrap a VM. Once you have that, you can make the high level language decide some logic that traditionally would be in C code, like manipulating page tables or whatever.

I'm pretty sure someone already compiled Linux to asm.js a few years ago. As asm.js is/was a subset of JS, you could say it's already been done. In theory, you could continue work from there in JS.

https://medium.com/@retrage/lkl-js-running-linux-kernel-on-j...

Depending on your definition of OS, yeah you could do that :)

OS in JS, ok I am interested now...

Well, there's a network stack already there, including HTTP and HTTPS on newer firmwares.

We are getting isOdd in the bootloader before GTA-IV

Considering how bad some of the Gamer-ish firmware UIs are now, it might be an improvement.

you may just have casted a curse on our future motherboards, damn you

OMG we can use ink for that

I think the proper term is blursed.

I think r/unixporn will love it once it gets DOM support :^)

> I googled for a while, they would say that this is not possible unless one uses npm/node

Gnome Shell and Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla Application Suite/Netscape 6+ (and Zotero[1]) are implemented on top of SpiderMonkey.

1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735616>

I've been using Deno a LOT for general shell scripting... it's been pretty nice in general. FWIW, Node, Bun and Deno have FS interfaces in the box, so yes, you can do it without npm modules. Though Deno allows you to directly reference the modules/repos from the script without needing a separate install step, package.json or node_modules directory.

It's also a single, self-updating executable and includes a lot in the box. Including SQLite3.

> I have had wanted to access the filesystem via JavaScript, just as I do via ruby or python

There are some (limited) ways to do so now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...

As for (1) vs (2), it’s not really an issue of JavaScript at all. The main question is, do you want to build something that runs in a browser? If you’re building a web app, you’ll have to use the sandboxed APIs (and probably JavaScript). If you don’t care about the runtime, yeah, you can use Node or Bun or Deno (or use another language altogether).

You are missing one option:

0) JavaScript must be abolished from the browser

Try webkitdirectory file attribute for browser access to the file system.

I was going to post this as well! A direct link to the video: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

Floating point was not supported in the Linux kernel to avoid having to save/restore FP registers.

Yeah floats works

It could be even better!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor

Who needs to garbage collect? Just leak memory until the system dies! That strategy seems to be good enough for claude code, anyway.

Are em-dashes really that common to use or did I just start noticing them after LLMs became popular for rewriting comments?

Not implying your comment is LLM generated, clearly it isn't but asking as a genuine question.

webuefi has already been shipped by google for use on chromebooks. but mozilla and apple irrationally refuse to implement the standard for "security reasons"

Soon™

It's just a silly experiment; the real endgame is to make a bootloader that is customisable using HTML/CSS/JS

Why not?