What does HackerNews think of redox?

In addition to Plan9 and the BSDs, which are Unixy and relatively familiar if you're coming from Linux/macOS, you could also checkout Haiku [0], which is quite different and descends from BeOS.

If you have an old TI calculator and want to try something other than a desktop OS, you could try out KnightOS[1].

As Shared404 mentioned, a Unix-inspired but quite new OS is Redox[2], which is written in Rust. Haven't used it at all, but it sounds like an interesting project.

[0] https://www.haiku-os.org/

[1] https://github.com/KnightOS/KnightOS

[2] https://github.com/redox-os/redox

Production ready means different things to diff people, and I don't know how many people use it in Prod, but have you looked at redox:

https://github.com/redox-os/redox

Exactly, the security in legacy systems is non-existent. I've been pretty pleased moving systems to the nerves-project [1] (which like GoKrazy has an A/B root file-system) to replace deprecated and ancient firmware systems. One of those setups required a Windows XP machine to flash the particular MCU that's obsolete now, a huge pain. It was almost impossible to update / patch.

Nerves is based on a Buildroot core but most of the system is built with Elixir and BEAM/OTP. It's fantastic having a high level language built for robustness and reasonable security. Still, I have dreams of porting BEAM to Redox OS one day [2] and replacing the C userland-bits with Rust-bits. Especially if you could represent the micro-kernel services as actors. That would be amazing!

1: https://nerves-project.org/ 2: https://github.com/redox-os/redox

This particular series is more of a toy OS for learning purposes (and through which they can teach things). At least, that's my impression of it.

Redox (https://github.com/redox-os/redox) is a Rust OS project that's aiming to actually be a usable consumer OS.

Redox is interesting and shows promise https://github.com/redox-os/redox

...but it’s in no way a departure from the status quo, even referring to itself as kernel + GNU/BSD style ecosystem.

I wonder if we will see a new paradigm anytime soon. The Hurd?

Well at least someone is already trying to write an OS with Rust.

https://github.com/redox-os/redox

> That also has little to do with the design constraints of a general purpose operating system.

Does it not? It's the same issue around no-stdlib, stricter sense of allocated memory, etc. If it isn't something that I can extrapolate from you'll have to explain better why. It's been a while since my CS courses on operating systems.

> Rust gets new features daily [1]. C gets new features every decade if we're lucky.

Yes, this is an age thing. I'm sure in it's infancy, C was gaining features and changing rapidly. For example, C changed significantly early on it's syntax from K&R to Ansi. C compilers have to support that.

It's reasonable to say that the language isn't ready for your use, but the features that are being gained are all related to areas around ease of use of the language, making it easier to get started and lower the initial learning curve. They seem important. By the way, you linked to the RFC repo instead of the language repo: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master. The language does have a lot of features that make it into the nightly branch, but those take a long time to bake until they're promoted to stable.

> Embedded space != kernel hacking, as I've already pointed out.

I thought we were talking about low-level programming, not explicitly Kernel hacking. Yes, Arduino and it's ilk are definitely not full OS'.

For actual Kernel hacking in Rust, there is:

- https://github.com/redox-os/redox

- https://intermezzos.github.io/book/

- https://os.phil-opp.com/

All of those projects seem very interesting. For Linux drivers, there was this exploratory project I saw a while back: https://github.com/tsgates/rust.ko (hasn't been touched in a while).

So people are doing it and seem to be enjoying it.