Looking for developers -- The Valix Operating System & Goals

[xvedejas]

Valix is a 32-bit managed OS. All user-space code is designed to run on top of a VM running within the kernel (think Java VM, not Virtualbox VM). So far the effort of two people (Essial and I), we are looking for more developers to help us with this project. Let me outline some goals and features.

* Written in C and FASM
* Written for x86 with plans for the ARM architecture
* Fully managed, type-safe, object-oriented user space
* A smalltalk-like programming language
* Graphics-oriented interface with GPU acceleration
* Lightweight kernel threads
* Hardware abstraction layer
* Simple, physical memory manager
* Website at http://valix.co.nr/
* Development using Gitorious
* All source released under the GPLv3
* Automated build scripts
* LiveCD target for now

Right now I've been working on the VM. So far it can call internal functions, and soon I'll be adding the ability to create user-defined functions. All of this is from bytecode currently; we need to write a bytecode compiler to turn source code into something readable by the VM. So far, about 10k lines of code have been written, almost entirely in C.

All of our code is browsable at http://gitorious.com/valix so if you are interested, I highly recommend looking through it. You can find our small community at #valix on irc.freenode.net

[redoktober]

first, great job!
second, just a small question.
you mentioned adding support for the ARM architecture.
does that mean you might be planning to design embedded systems using valix as the kernel?
'cause i'm working on building embedded systems witht he .net micro framework, and i was just curious..

cheers!

[earlz]

I looked at your language your designing http://www.themicrogeeks.com/sites/vali ... cification

It looks rather neat... I'm a bit confused on the `conforms` keyword thing. but it really looks like a neat mix of procedural(C++/C#) and functional paradigms.

Are you sure that such a language would not be compilable? (or "statically" JITed)

Also, you don't have garbage collection? I find that rather odd

[xvedejas]

you mentioned adding support for the ARM architecture.
does that mean you might be planning to design embedded systems using valix as the kernel?

I don't plan on designing embedded systems, but ARM is a growing architecture and I'd be happy for someone to use my kernel on one.

It looks rather neat... I'm a bit confused on the `conforms` keyword thing.

That's borrowed from smalltalk. It means that all elements of the array return a boolean true from the lambda function. It's not a keyword by the way: it's a method on the array object.

but it really looks like a neat mix of procedural(C++/C#) and functional paradigms.

It's meant to be a strongly-typed smalltalk variant, with some influence from ocaml and C#

Are you sure that such a language would not be compilable? (or "statically" JITed)

It could, but this is not my plans for the moment. Maybe in the future.

Also, you don't have garbage collection? I find that rather odd

There will be garbage collection.