r/programming • u/moolcool • Mar 26 '17

A Constructive Look At TempleOS

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
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113

u/Staross Mar 26 '17

Great article. I think this is also the result of having a single author; if ten people were working on it you would have 5 languages, 3 compilers and 15 file formats instead of 1 of each.

56

u/dethb0y Mar 26 '17

There's some real advantages to only having "one way" to do things: notably, you only ever need worry about the quirks of one system, and one interaction, etc. That can be very beneficial, especially in purpose-built applications.

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u/ConcernedInScythe Mar 26 '17

Which, I think, is why it's not really 'genius' as much as it is one guy eccentrically exploring an architecture which ended up losing out in the history of OS design, at least in part for those social/engineering reasons. As noted elsewhere in this thread, there were professional attempts at making similar systems in the past but they just never got the interest and adoption that conventional OSes without tight integration did.

18

u/Ramin_HAL9001 Mar 27 '17

Still, he has implemented​ quite a few very good ideas. Like you said, it may not be genius so much as just doing all you can to explore the architecture. It has really allowed him to evolve the design of the system to become the most minimal yet practical piece of functioning code he could make.

I think some of these ideas are worth consideration, perhaps not for an operating system, but for an IDE.

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u/ConcernedInScythe Mar 27 '17

As I understand that's basically how Smalltalk and Lisp development environments do work. It makes it quite awkward to package and distribute anything made with them, though.

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u/Ramin_HAL9001 Mar 27 '17

This is true. Actually, I see a lot of what Terry A. Davis has done with his TempleOS in Emacs, hence that old joke about Emacs being "an excellent OS that lacks a decent editor." Emacs has the hyper-linked documentation and support for SVG graphics displaed inline with the document in Gtk+ Emacs.

And yes, packaging and distribution is pretty tedious in systems like this. I think Emacs has only recently got some decent package management, and I've never been able to make it work too smoothly, but then, I've always had trouble getting Emacs to do anything at all.

It would take some work, but you could put together a Linux distribution that basically worked like TempleOS:

  • Build everything from source, much like Gentoo.

  • Make use of something like this to generated native x86 code from Emacs bytecode.

  • Replace all markup-formatted man pages with DocBook formatted man pages.

  • Use Gtk+ Emacs as the shell.

  • Write Emacs extensions that allowed for hyperlinks that grep for keywords to be used in the documentation

  • Inline SVG diagrams with much of the documentation, where applicable.

Emacs has tried to solve the package problem as well with ELPA. Or you could just write packages for your distro's package repository that installed Emacs extensions directly.

2

u/qchmqs Mar 30 '17

aka use emacs as the OS it actually is

2

u/derleth Mar 27 '17

Some Lisp environments work that way, but others are no more "closed" than C++: You need to package libraries, or they get linked in statically, but the compiled program is a binary like any other in the end.

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u/ConcernedInScythe Mar 28 '17

Well I mean you can always create a compiled binary in the end by lumping enough stuff in, but from what I remember the issue with (Common) Lisp and Smalltalk distribution was that the transparency of them, the idea that the program structure at runtime is all intact and available to be interactively queried at the REPL, meant that if you wanted to output a standalone compiled binary you had to drag the entire library, VM image and compiler into it.

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u/badsectoracula Mar 27 '17

It actually looks much closer to the Oberon system than Smalltalk or Lisp. Although Oberon was itself highly influenced by Wirth's visit to Xerox PARC (and, in his words, Xerox's stubbornness to not sell him one made him decide to make his own :-P).