Re: Lua OS

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:26, Martin Guy <martinwguy@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 April 2012 03:22, Rena <hyperhacker@gmail.com> wrote:
>> To me, the really interesting idea isn't "what if we wrote a whole OS
>> in Lua", but "what if we took the nice scriptablility that Lua offers,
>> and extended it to an entire OS". Any scripting language could
>> probably do the job; I just feel Lua is one of the best. :-)
>>
>> Already, I use Lua to script my text editor (TextAdept) and window
>> manager (Awesome) to make them work just how I like.
>> [...] I find myself wishing I could script all my other
>> applications. Now imagine everything were already written in Lua and
>> easily extensible and scriptable... some amazing things you could do.
>> ...
>> I dream of a day where I can program my computer to behave exactly how
>> I want, right down to individual apps, without having to reimplement
>> everything myself...
>
> I think maybe you've got to the heart of it here - not implementing an
> OS in Lua (imagine writing device drivers with no builtin bit
> operations!) but making it so much easier to customise supplied
> software by providing a scripted layer at a low level.
>
> I guess your implementation strategy here would be to make a Linux
> distribution using the best of such tools: awesome, textadept, gimp
> and so on, and to add such scriptability to the best of the tools that
> don't already have it, hoping to avoid the MSWordBASIC et al disaster
> whereby any document propagates viruses as soon as you open it.
>
>    M
>

That would be one way, though you're still running apps written in C
at that point. What I had in mind was more like Android, where most of
its apps are written in Java (though C is still an option if you need
it). Definitely you don't want documents being able to run arbitrary
code though! I only meant for apps to be scriptable by the user
(creating/editing script files in specific places). Of course we can't
prevent clueless users from installing malicious scripts, any more
than we can prevent them from installing malicious C programs on an
existing Unix...

-- 
Sent from my toaster.