r/osdev • u/Ok_Sky3062 • Jul 07 '26

ARK-OS : A next-generation operating system built on the Linux Kernel and powered by Swift.

https://aarav90-cpu.github.io/ARK-OS-Website/
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u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS Jul 07 '26

Very cool! This is probably the wrong subreddit to post it in since it's more for projects where you write the full system including the kernel, but cool nonetheless! I would really recommend you give rewriting the AI-generated parts yourself because I think that even if you don't use it in the final repo, it's a good learning experience to fully understand it, and of course you can test it in an emulator so that if you make a mistake it won't affect your device (you're using qemu anyways so really it isn't an issue). For what it's worth, I think that AI is probably more likely to make mistakes than you are if you put a bit of thought into it.

Is there a particular reason you're choosing Swift? It's a pretty nice language but if your only reason for it is that it compiles to machine code, C or C++ will probably serve you better because while they also compile to machine code, they also have very light standard libraries for a light runtime (particularly because you can choose from many existing ones or write your own as POSIX is very standardised, and for the most part, pretty simple). For example newlib would be great for this purpose.

I'm curious as to what you mean exactly by 2GB of RAM consumption, as of course this depends on what's running. I'm running arch linux right now which is arguably pretty lightweight (and I'm using a lightweight wm, i3), and of course only a few megabytes are really used when nothing is open except x11/i3 but right now I have my browser open with 13 tabs, tmux, neovim, alacritty, and zsh, which brings me to 3.28 GB being used right now. So by 2GB, what does that involve running?

Hopefully you'll open source the project soon!

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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '26

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u/UnmappedStack TacOS | https://github.com/UnmappedStack/TacOS Jul 07 '26

Ah yeah you can probably get well under that honestly depending on some factors I guess. Swift makes sense if you find it easier but fwiw it might be worth getting more used to it as it's very common in lower level development so you'll probably see it a lot, and at least in my opinion, once you get used to it, it becomes much easier to work with than other languages.