Why does the OSDev Wiki say it takes a year to finish an OS?

[Geri]

The only reason is documentation non availability, which is an absolutely different problem.

documentation would be not a big help to drive something put together from 1-3 billion transistors and 800 different type of units to run a piece of a video decoder in it that is written from 500k lines. i guess the documentation itself would be around 100k pages in A4 papers, who would not waste 200 years from his life to have it?

basically if you have some obsource crud, at least run it on cpu if its possible. gpus are not as efficient as many people think. a built in video decoder is of course efficient, if it can decode that practicular video with the given codec.

the industry should focus on creating proper cpus and OS-es and not wasting time into dsp-s and gpus just becouse a few kid cant enjoy a 20 million polygon elf anime girl games in 1360x768, only to 40 m 8k.

[hgoel]

The only reason is documentation non availability, which is an absolutely different problem.

documentation would be not a big help to drive something put together from 1-3 billion transistors and 800 different type of units to run a piece of a video decoder in it that is written from 500k lines. i guess the documentation itself would be around 100k pages in A4 papers, who would not waste 200 years from his life to have it?

basically if you have some obsource crap, at least run it on cpu if its possible. gpus are not as efficient as many people think. a built in video decoder is of course efficient, if it can decode that practicular video with the given codec.

the industry should focus on creating proper cpus and OS-es and not wasting time into dsp-s and gpus just becouse a few kid cant to jack off to 20 million polygon elf anime girl games in 1360x768, only to 40 m 8k.

You say that considering your avatar...
Also, clearly you don't know what you're talking about. I'd recommend learning what you are talking about before saying words.

[Geri]

hgoel: you dont know what are you talking about
(also, nothing offensive by the anime example, i just had to illustrate the hooman behaviour with something )

[Sik]

Users expect to be able to start up their browser and play a YouTube video without all other programs and I/O crawling to a halt.

To be fair, I'm still waiting for the day that happens. (being stuck with older hardware sucks =/ those of us who don't have money to spare to upgrade every two years and are forced to cope with outdated overpriced hardware because of the country we live in get hit hard)

[MDenham]

Users expect to be able to start up their browser and play a YouTube video without all other programs and I/O crawling to a halt.

To be fair, I'm still waiting for the day that happens. (being stuck with older hardware sucks =/ those of us who don't have money to spare to upgrade every two years and are forced to cope with outdated overpriced hardware because of the country we live in get hit hard)

For that matter, I'm waiting for Facebook to actually learn how to design their page so that it doesn't end up leaking memory to the tune of about 20MB/hr, because as it stands if you leave it open for 3-4 days your computer becomes practically unusable regardless of browser.

[alexfru]

For that matter, I'm waiting for Facebook to actually learn how to design their page so that it doesn't end up leaking memory to the tune of about 20MB/hr, because as it stands if you leave it open for 3-4 days your computer becomes practically unusable regardless of browser.

The funny (or rather sad) thing is that AdBlock+ may consume twice as much as facebook. Embrace the ads the hard way.

And, as I learned it the painful way recently, if you open up for later a seemingly regular website and forget about it, it may use up all of your monthly allotment of internet traffic (e.g. 1TB) due to bugs in the website code or the browser or both (I had the repro only in one of three browsers; and no, the website wasn't showing movies or such non-stop but it sure was constantly downloading stuff at comparable rate). Way to go!

[Bipman]

It depends on what you want to do. I'm writing a small secure OS that will boot and then do various things to transfer a file securely, no gui, multiple processor or threads (yet). This has taken me 2 months of working outside of my day job until late at night and risking my wife throwing things at me. Add in GUI stuff and threads etc. and it's just going to take ages even if you are working on it all day. Very enjoyable though!

Bipman

[MollenOS]

risking my wife throwing things at me

Almost hits too close to home :p

[Bipman]

It's safer after dark

Bipman

[Solar]

Why does the OSDev Wiki say it takes a year to finish an OS? Many people can be fast at typing as well as knowing what to do.

The Linux kernel has more than 100k lines of code. Now it is 15 million lines of code. It doesn't mean other projects will take a year!

People can make a simple GUI in a month or so. I'm not being stupid but why would it take a year?

Compared to a full-featured OS, a standard C library is ridiculously simple. After all, every single function is already specified and well-documented. There are books about how to write one. You even get open source "previous art" to look at. And most of those functions are really two-line no-brainers. Right?

I made commits to PDCLib on over 150 seperate days. I will leave the conclusions to you.

If you believe programming is just about writing down code at top speed, you have lots yet to learn. There are tests to be conceived and written, bugs to be traced, changes to be made, documentation to be written, and you won't be able to work on your hobby project every day.

Unless you actually do that, in which case I'd pity you, because it wouldn't be a hobby anymore at that point...