Node OS

bsimpson 10 years ago |

I'm astonished that this has been up for an hour and no one's mentioned Atwood's Law:

"Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/

tambourine_man 10 years ago | |

THE BIRTH & DEATH OF JAVASCRIPT

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

weitzj 10 years ago | | |

Great Talk to watch

nickpsecurity 10 years ago | |

People are even doing hardware design in the browser now. That may or may not directly involve JavaScript on HW part as I don't know how much those apps rely on servers. It's conceivable a basic, EDA tool could be built with Javascript, though.

58028641 10 years ago |

But the kernel needs to be in javascript. Since anything written in javascript becomes 2X better. </sarcasm>

58028641 10 years ago | |

I find it sad that before I added </sarcasm> people thought I was being serious and downvoted me. Once I added </sarcasm> I got upvoted.

agumonkey 10 years ago | |

Not to forget your bootloader. grub.js

58028641 10 years ago | | |

What about the firmware?

montibbalt 10 years ago | | |

nsa_backdoor.bin.js

amelius 10 years ago |

Cooperative multitasking, as found in the Windows 3.1 era!

nickpsecurity 10 years ago | |

I have a two-finger salute I typically give to cooperative multitasking especially thanks to the Windows 3.1 era. ;) I still investigate it with better type systems, languages, hardware monitors, whatever. I just think "NOOOOO!!!" is a good default when I see it.

adambrod 10 years ago |

What would be really interesting is Elixir-OS/Erlang-OS where the entire OS can take advantage of a 50 core CPU.

edgyswingset 10 years ago | |

You may be interested in learning about some of the approaches taken by the Midori project:http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/

A research OS with the theme of treating the OS as if it were a distributed system.

rubyn00bie 10 years ago | |

Actually, BEAM can somewhat (and probably should be) considered an OS. It's got most everything you'd need baked in and ready to go...

Right now, I'd say the bigger issue isn't he entire OS taking advantage but the applications running within it... in which case, yes, BEAM would be an amazing paradigm shift! :D

michaelmrose 10 years ago | |

The entire os can in fact take advantage of a 50 core cpu and most of the things that would benefit the most can.

nickpsecurity 10 years ago | | |

I remember SGI adding code to Linux to to make it work on their NUMA machines with 256 sockets and 2,000-4,000 cores with single system image. They were my favorite but not only one. I'm sure some distro out there can handle 50 by now. :)

adambrod 10 years ago | | |

Thanks, I was not aware of this :)

alecco 10 years ago | |

Are you saying current OSs dont?!

tdeck 10 years ago | | |

Current OSes don't include the buzzword "Elixir" so they aren't relevant to Hackers.

adambrod 10 years ago | | |

I'm honestly not sure. I was under the impression that it was limited... but thinking back perhaps I was thinking of the software that usually doesn't take advantage of multiple processes. Also half joking :D

merdreubu 10 years ago | |

http://nerves-project.org/

davidw 10 years ago | |

I have no idea about the details, but this is kind of cool:

http://erlangonxen.org/

http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/

shruubi 10 years ago |

One thing I can't seem to find is, is this a true nodejs-based operating system in that it's all single threaded? single-threaded event loop stuff works well for network servers but an OS? To me it seems like a terrible idea.

joshdickson 10 years ago | |

I'm going to have to assume it's using some form of Node's clustering support, which will let you run up to X instances where X is the maximum number of supported instances for the number of cores you have. Otherwise, you're right, bad combination.

pedalpete 10 years ago | |

What about something like ChromeOS? Does it need multi-threading?

If each app is running it's own thread, and can spawn new threads, maybe that would work.

Also, though Node.js is currently single-threaded, there is the Nexus project https://github.com/voodooattack/nexusjs which is doing multi-threaded javascript. Maybe this or Node.js will support multiple threads in the future.

spriggan3 10 years ago | | |

Nashorn on the JVM supports threads. So the problem is definitely not a JS issue but a JS engine issue. NodeJS is single threaded because NodeJS V8 is. There was a talk about implementing workers that communicate view text messages though, I don't know the state of workers in NodeJS .

gschrader 10 years ago | |

It's still based on the linux kernel.

itsyogesh 10 years ago | |

I recently read about the SIMD support for Javascript. While parallelism and distributed systems contribute a lot to the OS, SIMD is something nice to have on top that. So, JS may be single threaded but having SIMD support might speed things up.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

abritinthebay 10 years ago | |

Why not? Many languages and Operating Systems used to be single threaded. Many still functionally are for a lot of things.

Of course it's still challenging but it's built on top of the Linux kernel so it's also not a pure NodeOS (which would probably be impossible).

gberger 10 years ago |

> node-os is the first operating system powered by npm Read More

That's not a very nice tagline to have after the recent left-pad fiasco.

qu4z-2 10 years ago | |

My favourite part is that I clicked it and got a 404. That seems really appropriate.

teen 10 years ago | |

fiasco?

guessmyname 10 years ago | | |

Let me Google that for you: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=npm+fiasco

jdubs 10 years ago |

Wow this looks lovely to support

cheez 10 years ago |

When all you have is a hammer...

brainflake 10 years ago |

I love node, but a node REPL in lieu of a shell sounds like the worst thing ever.

notduncansmith 10 years ago |

"Read More" link 404'd for me.

wrong_variable 10 years ago |

<< Die heart Node.js fan >>

As much as I love Node.js, I have grown to dislike npm. Git + Github is a much nicer way to publish.

Also the whole left-pad fiasco.

sqren 10 years ago | |

Not going to defend npm here, but how is using Github as registry going to avoid left-pad-gate?

wrong_variable 10 years ago | | |

you are right - its not possible to avoid left-pad-gate due to github being a similar company as npm ( in terms of law ).

But using git means its theoretically possible to have multiple registries - etc.

bitwize 10 years ago | |

To be quite frank, the fact that the node community hasn't adopted vendoring as a standard practice speaks volumes about that community.

shrugger 10 years ago |

Now you can left-pad your entire environment instead of just your production build!

Wow!

joesmo 10 years ago |

I assume the whole thing goes down when left-pad or some other trivial dependency can't be resolved.

AgentME 10 years ago | |

npm no longer allows packages to be unpublished after 24 hours.

alishan-l 10 years ago |

It's a brave new world

int_handler 10 years ago |

It's happening: https://xkcd.com/1508/

cls59 10 years ago | |

Also: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...