Hosted Development Environments / Languages

[Kenny]

Does anyone know of (or have implemented) a language other than C that would be suitable for running on an OS?

Assuming a stating point of an OS that covers the basics (memory managment, filesystem, some form of input, graphics and sound capability), I'm looking for a programming language which has source available and that could be fairly easily hosted onto the OS, giving immediate access to a wealth of software (read: games).

Languages like C are fairly easy to implement and have lots of source, but don't have the framework to cover the graphics and sound. Languages like Java or .NET have all the framework, but would take a lot of implementing. I have used languages such as DarkBasic or Blitz Basic or (shudder) Visual Basic in the past that would be ok. An emulator like MAME would be ideal if it had compilation capabilities.

The ideal I have in my head is an open source language with a library of program source available. The language has a straightforward implementation (possibly even a language designed for implementing of custom OSes or could be implemented in parts) and abstracts at least graphics, input, sound and filesystem. Once implemented, it is trivial to download the source of an implementation of Worm, Asteroids, Pac-man or something and compile it.

I think the value such a language would add to the projects we are all developing and to the community as a whole would be good, but on the other hand I may be dreaming.

(My apologies if this has been discussed before, trying to search for "programming" or "language" on the forums doesn't work too well.)

[NickJohnson]

There are a few projects that are working on making a kernel that runs a virtual machine or interpreted language of some sort. .NET/CLI has been a popular one, because of the popularity of C# - I know MOSA is one of those projects. The main problem with this is the size and complexity of the runtime environment, increased by the lack of high level resources on the bare hardware.

The kernel cannot be written entirely in a managed environment, of course, but I believe some of the projects have a lot of the mechanism past the runtime environment implemented in the managed virtual machine.

For other languages (that are not managed, mostly), there is a section on the wiki for that.

[Kenny]

Sorry, I'm not talking about writing a kernel in one of these high level languages, but finding one of these high level languages for implementing on a custom kernel. The conversations about which language to use to write the kernel have been done to death.

I was exploring and found an Amiga programming language called Amos that would be a good possibility if source code for the compiler were available. It has abstraction for graphics and sound and there are lots of existing games written in it.

Any other thoughts?

[fronty]

If you write a library with C, you can use it with any other language which uses same calling convention as your library.

[NickJohnson]

Sorry, I misunderstood you at first.

Languages like C are fairly easy to implement and have lots of source, but don't have the framework to cover the graphics and sound. Languages like Java or .NET have all the framework, but would take a lot of implementing. I have used languages such as DarkBasic or Blitz Basic or (shudder) Visual Basic in the past that would be ok. An emulator like MAME would be ideal if it had compilation capabilities.

I think it would take more effort to write an implementation of a managed VM that connects to resources in an OS than write a library that gives those resources a C interface. Once you have a C-accessible interface for sound and video, you can simply connect it to your VM implementation; in fact, that's essentially what you would have to do to make the VM use sound and video, sans some pretty interfaces and wrappers. You can just port a simple A/V lib like SDL, which has a lot of games written for it.

[Solar]

Assuming a stating point of an OS that covers the basics (memory managment, filesystem, some form of input, graphics and sound capability), I'm looking for a programming language which has source available and that could be fairly easily hosted onto the OS, giving immediate access to a wealth of software (read: games).

Many of the what you call "hosted" languages have their hosting layer written in C, or C++, so...

Languages like C are fairly easy to implement and have lots of source, but don't have the framework to cover the graphics and sound.

*COUGH*



I think I answered that one before.

"Not having" and "not having as part of the core language" are two very different things.

[jal]

I was exploring and found an Amiga programming language called Amos that would be a good possibility if source code for the compiler were available.

AMOS is BASIC.


JAL