What does HackerNews think of ling?

For any "How do I...X?" question involving connecting two pieces of software together in a different way, the first thing I try to do is look at the API(s) that connects them. In the case of a program and the OS, it's the system calls, device drivers, and standard libraries.

There have been efforts to provide the capability of running a program without an OS before, but any such effort is going to need to provide the system calls and standard libraries used by the program, and the infrastructure to support it (device drivers, management, etc.). That that point it becomes a mini-OS.

An example is Erlang on Xen. Xen is more often run with a guest OS running inside it, and then the program runs within that guest os. The http://erlangonxen.org/ folks made Ling (https://github.com/cloudozer/ling), software that enables an Erlang BEAM VM to be run directly on Xen, and thereby run a single Erlang program on Ling.

There is even a separately implemented BEAM VM for running directly on Xen hypervisor:

https://github.com/cloudozer/ling

An impressively done book on BEAM instruction sets:

https://github.com/cloudozer/ling/tree/master/doc

There is even a handy dandy online instruction set completion search:

http://erlangonxen.org/more/beam

Regarding unikernels it is fun to combine it with Erlang, since Erlang already has process isolation by default, so it acts as a mini-OS for your application. Process supervision is a bit like the initd (or systemd), it has networking and file system access API,etc...

So there is:

http://erlangonxen.org/

code: https://github.com/cloudozer/ling

Basicly instead of:

hardware|kernel|os|erlangvm|yourcode

it is now:

hardware|xen|ling|yourcode

Not sure how functional it is now. I haven't followed the project in the last year much. But I see some development on github lately.