Dreaming of Making My Own Os- What Should I Use? (Suggestions)

questions about writing an operating system

1: You should only need a small amount of assembly to handle the boot process and load the C code. Shouldn't be more than like 20-30 lines I think.

2-4: I haven't really used C++ with OS dev, but I think I remember reading that it takes more work to get it running somewhere. Sorry I can't be of more help.

5: You "can" do it using MinGW, but from my experience it mostly complicates things. I could never really get a Windows environment working, but I also gave up without too much effort.

EDIT: Here is a link to some example assembly. This is all I ever had to use:
http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/2.-Genesis.html

The rest of that site is a pretty good tutorial too if you are at all interested in that kind of thing.

Can a whole operating system be written without using even one line of C/C++ code?

Yes and no.

First of all, it's important to remember that whatever your language of choices, in the end the compiled product is in assembly language (or more accurately, machine code). Even interpreters (such as the cpython interpreter) are ultimately translating your scripts into machine code.

But that's probably being overly technical and missing the heart of your question:

"Can I write an operating system in a higher-level language?"

The answers to this are both personal and technical.

First, the personal side: if don't already know how to write an operating system in a mix of assembly language and C then you have absolutely no business trying your hand at OS design.

Often those new to programming have these sorts of questions because they want to do something as cool as writing a new OS without all the learning required to even attempt such a project. They wonder if higher-level languages can be a way to bypass all that messy study.

So if, in your heart-of-hearts, this is what you're after, stop now. Stop, stop, stop. Becoming good at something is hard work. There are no shortcuts. Be ready to roll up your sleeves and get some carpal tunnel syndrome.

That doesn't preclude following a path to eventual OS design! If that's your passion, then start at the top and work your way down. Get books on networking protocols, memory management, threading, etc, tackle each major subsystem and get to know it well. You can't write a new one if you can't use an old one!

Then read books on operating system design and implementation until you dream about process management methodologies.

Just bear in mind, the amount of knowledge necessary (not just of computer operations but of social constructs like APIs) is immense. This is a long journey and a rewarding one. If you truly love this craft like I do, you'll be glad you took the time even if you never actually write an OS.

Now, the technical answer. You're going to need a bootloader, and that must be written in assembly language. After all, your processor doesn't know C#. Past the bootloader phase, you can write your OS code in any language you want and it'll run, assuming your language can compile to machine code binaries (and not bytecode!)

However, even in our current "glut of cycles" computing environment, an OS must be lean and efficient and that's nearly impossible to achieve in a higher level language, even more so in an interpreted language.

Chances are, you'll need to write your own compiler/interpreter of that given language as a core component of your OS. That core compiler would likely allow only a restricted subset of the language (and you'd bootstrap by writing a more robust compiler in the restricted sub-language). Otherwise the performance will be abysmal.

But all of this is horribly complex and a real discussion of the issues requires a depth of knowledge you probably currently lack. But if you have the drive to do so, you can easily change that, and then I'd happily debate approaches all day!

If it makes you feel any better, I do know enough to write an operating system, and still I sit around daydreaming, trying to figure out how much of an OS could I get away with writing in python. ;)

Deciding among with Java technologies should use - beginner

If you're lost, keep it simple.

For the kind of desktop apps you describe, you'll need Swing and JDBC. If you switch to web, substitute JSPs written using only JSTL and servlets. You'll have to know HTML and CSS to write JSPs. You can embellish those with JavaScript as needed.

You'll go a long way with just those.

The others you mentioned are just noise until you become more comfortable:

1. EJBs are for enterprise scale apps. You get to leave a lot of complex stuff like threading, object pooling and lifecycle, etc. to an app server and concentrate on expressing your business logic in distributed, transactional components called Enterprise Java Beans. Not necessary to start.
2. BlueJ is a beginners IDE designed to shield folks from the complexities of Java. I wouldn't recommend it.
3. OSGi - modular deployments for web apps. Not necessary to start.
4. Swing App Framework? I'm not familiar with it - I don't write Swing. If you mean Spring, I think it's an excellent framework, but not necessary to start.

Is programming knowledge necessary for an user experience designer?

So, my question is this - how important do you think is
programming knowledge for user
interface design?

I think a basic knowledge of the standard user interface for the platform is required (text fields, combo boxes, radio buttons, etc). A good designer should be familiar with the capabilities and limitations of these GUI components, from a developer's point of view. So I guess some basic programming knowledge would be useful.

My personal belief is that design
should not be constrained by technical
possibilities and in theory,
everything that the designer dreams of
(at least the practical things) should
be possible technically - albeit with
workarounds or a little hacking.

I think there are important qualifications here --- each OS has guidelines on what constitutes good GUI design, and it's beneficial for your product that you follow them because the user has a certain mental model of how he or she should interact with applications on that platform. (Having said that, there may be good reasons for breaking some design conventions, e.g. in games, specialized graphics/music applications.)

how do you go about teaching someone
with absolutely no programming
experience the graphical frameworks on
various platforms?

Each toolkit makes available a whole bunch of small sample programs to demonstrate the use of different components --- this is probably a good first step to acquaint oneself with them.

Custom Kernel: Implement filesystem

I'll try to give you a few tips/hints - a clear answer isn't that simple:

1. An ext2 filesystem written in C is just C. C is just a programming language - you can use C++, plain assembly or a few others (A few os'dever use D) - but not a "managed" language etc. But it is important that you have a rock solid understanding of this language. In my opinion assembly is a MUST (Take a look at the scheduler in an operating system -> plain assembly)

2. Do you really want to write an USB driver ? It isn't "just" a simple USB driver (Layer of abstractions). Why a USB driver and not a floppy disk or CD driver (Believe me - a floppy driver in 32 bit protected mode isn't that hard) ?

3. Please focus on your project. Of course Linux (Early versions) and Minix have example code, but take care of the design structure (Monolithic/Microkernel or hybrid-kernel) - and don't mix it, write your own code.

Please make on step after the other. You wrote a basic IRQ handling and the plan is to write a keyboard/mouse driver - write the keyboard driver ! Don't dream about loading and executing files (Rom wasn't built in one day).

You have to read documentations, for example the Intel manuals or other "books". A very popular forum is osdev.org - take a look at the wiki. As twalberg said, it's a very huge module - stay focused on the main parts of your operating system.

I know, this is not the answer to your question - but it's important not to go in the wrong direction and dream of a fancy UI or something like this ;)

osdev.org forum

osdev.org wiki

Intel manuals

And a few other books in my book shelf can you find here (Tanenbaum, Silberschatz with Peter Galvin - great books!):

Books

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