Writing an OS in Rust: Returning from Exceptions
I think that now that we have a language suitable for writing  kernels, we also need to have a discussion about what do we really want from a new os. Over the years there have been quite a few OSs and some of them were more advanced than the currently popular OSs. E.g. AS/400 didn't make the distinction between memory and hdd which seems to me like a good idea. BeOS has a fully async API which resulted in a much better user experience and better CPU utilization. Tandem had erlang like processes. None of the popular OSs have this. I'm not sure I want another UNIX implementation.<p>Furthermore, why are all the APIs so diverse? Why aren't there reactive operating systems (as in OS with reactive API)? All of these ideas can be explored in Rust but on some level I'm not sure what should be the feature set of the OS of the future.<p>The current driver models aren't that great either.