It takes "17 million lines of code in Thing X to do Activity Y" is patently wrong. Many of the lines of code in Linux is dedicated to drivers, drivers which are likely not even loaded. Many more lines of code may be unused this specific scenario, if you are simply reading on WordPress, you aren't using the admin code at all.<p>The reality is that a miniscule amount of those lines of code is involved in the activity. You can write an OS and stack that could achieve a very specific task (IncludeOS), but then it could only perform that one task. Now that there is 'no wasteful code', how would he record his weekly screencast, or edit it, or transcode it, or upload it, or view it? Everyone would only be able to view text files.<p>These systems are this complex because there is demand for them to be. This really seems like tilting at windmills.
So it's not just me. I've considered developing a toy OS as a fun project for a long time, but I was always mystified about what to do about graphics. The whole reason I wanted to do an OS was to do a sort of 'start fresh' thing where I looked at the hardware we have now and designed for THAT instead of designing to support 1970s era software. The first step is if it's a 4K monitor, the first graphics mode is 4K, not 80x25 text. Fonts are vector by default, not raster. Graphical compositing of the display, even when its the initial 'text mode' terminal would be rendered on a 3D isometric projection surface using a hardware accelerated graphics card. And how do you do that exactly? Even if you are willing to limit yourself to a single nVidia or ATi card supported to start? Ah...
This is real talk! But, How does this appeal to a unified architecture interfere with the marketspace? I'd love for more programmers to listen to this video and give their thoughts!
I would be very curious to know the thoughts of HN readers: Is it a good idea (define a system wide spec to remove the need for drivers etc.)?<p>Seems to make sense to me, but i know nothing. If someone defined one, an emulator could be written. may even be able to prove some gain that would make it attractive for a manufacturer to impliment it.
Remember when the SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), "Star Wars", Reagan's fraudulent ballistic-missile defense project, was considered impossible to implement because (as reported by David Parnas) it would take a <i>million lines</i> of code to implement, and (more importantly) would have to work right, on the first try?<p>The program was believed-in by the Soviet military, which spent so much on countermeasures it crashed the Soviet economy, bringing down Gorbachev and, ultimately, the USSR itself. Which seemed OK at the time (people talked about a "peace dividend" -- joke was on us!), but now we have Putin. And Trump.<p>But I got a free trip to Hungary, in 1987, to report on research in point semiconductor defects, paid for by a grant from the US Air Force out of their Star Wars budget.