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stevenup7002 wrote:Well first, you should experiment with a Hello World bootloader.
I think easiest thing to make sure a new OS project will not get anywhere is to start by writing a bootloader.
There is GRUB. It's a good thing. It's much better idea to replace it once the OS itself works.
hckr83 wrote:I made an OS in C while learning it...It was the biggest waste of time ever!
You more or less have the reason there it was waste of time. You should not attempt to write an operating system in a language you don't know relatively well. There is nothing wrong with writing an OS in C, but you shouldn't expect good results unless you learn C properly first. Same applies to any programming language.
The real problem with goto is not with the control transfer, but with environments. Properly tail-recursive closures get both right.
And replacing GRUB should probably never happen - they don't have the burden of also writing an OS, so they'll do better at writing a bootloader than you
It wasn't until I started to figure out how to write my own boot record (and doing it!) that I really started to accelerate and take true control over my project.
Nevertheless, I did it formally until after having been around a good time with a very messy kernel. I considered that figuring out the boot record could help me to program best, and it did, because I learned of various ways of reutilizing heavily the values of the registers from one place to another and also use the instructions with smaller opcodes and the less number of them to do the most.
If well that kind of optimization of relying on partial register values and the like is generally slower and extremely hard to implement in the kernel (for its arbitrary execution nature and the fact that its sequence cannot be predicted to shorten methods to just the bare necessary), it still helps greatly to get used to fine-grain programming, since it will give you a much more detailed view of what to do, how to do it and to avoid and solve the bugs that might appear.
I still use to add new things to this 512-byte program, but don't leave them there permanently if they prove possible to be migrated to the kernel itself.
Well if you really want to write your operating system or atleast a small bootloader with fancy output, you should have a great interest in it. You can start with hello world bootloader. But before that make sure you know Assembly a bit.
