Re: Lua OS

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 11:15 AM, sergei karhof <karhof21@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Tim Caswell <tim@creationix.com> wrote:
> What I would find extremely interesting would be a system that's bare-bones
> linux reusing all the linux device drivers (nobody wants to rewrite all
> those in lua, trust me). Then on top of that lua, have a basic network
> aware lua engine that works somewhat like a web browser. You can take the
> idea that Mozilla is doing with Boot to Gecko and instead use lua. The
> system can have some basic abilities built-in that are exposed to lua and
> thus scriptable. It could be HTML + CSS like the web or it could be
> something else. Maybe a traditional desktop gui system that's based on
> widgets like GTK or QT or even a simple canvas-like API with optional
> opengl. The key here is to use the internet at the core. It needs a way to
> store applications offline in some local cache and a way to store data
> locally. This would be a perfect operating system for Raspberry PI
> computers that are starting to ship. People could write software that does
> anything they want, host it on network servers and interlink them. It would
> be like the internet all over again, except using lua and aimed at
> applications rather than hyperlinked documents.

That's pretty much the point of Lua OS: Linux kernel plus a Lua
environment. But it is still in early stages and the guy has not been
working much on it recently.

If such an operating platform were already available, with a bare
minimum of functionality already working, I predict that it would be
soon colonized by us on this list. Eh eh :) And then we would have the
best of both worlds: Linux support for hardware, etc with a Lua
front-end for all system management, as well as for a whole range of
applications. Am I dreaming already?

My point wasn't so much reusing of linux kernel drivers. I don't think that's a hard point to sell. My point was making a system like the web where all applications live on network servers and the local machine is a client to this network. Boot to Gecko has proven this model can work. If you see the phone, it looks like any other smart-phone. The apps appear local, there is an app store, you can make phone calls, etc. But everything and I mean everything other than linux and gecko is loaded from the internet. They prime the cache for certain apps so that you can make phone calls without internet access, but all apps, including the app launcher are just web pages like http://calculator.gaiamobile.org/

Once in the early 90's I started a project like this using qbasic, but the world and the internet weren't ready for it. Now with most machines having internet connectivity of some sort most the time, (as well as much easier to embed scripting languages like lua) this is possible.