Interesting, all sources of MS-DOS 1.25 is just 12K lines of code, including comments.
Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.
Today, this seems like a pretty small project, and most commercial apps are significantly bigger.
That has me thinking though. I have always wanted to try OS dev but all the stuff I have read says it will take years to get a system that can print hello world but surely it can't take that long to write 12k lines.
There are a lot of tutorials out there that'll walk you through quite a bit more than that in a weekend.
A "something that boots" kernel is very small although obviously it doesn't do much. By the time you get to "hello world" the program will have grown but it's still relatively small.