Vivo Unveils BlueOS, Based on Rust Language | Hacker News Reader

Vivo Unveils BlueOS, Based on Rust Language

sparrowsnews.com

40 pointssbt56715 comments

> The standout feature of Vivo BlueOS is its utilization of the Rust programming language, marking a global first in building a system framework for an operating system.

Using rust is not a feature.

Perhaps not for most applications, but I think it actually is for an OS. Operating systems are pretty tightly tied to the paradigm of their systems programming language, and possible memory-safety guarantees is a strong feature for an OS as well.

History does not seem to agree with you. There were memory safe(er) languages before Rust existed, and OSes written in those languages. Neither became popular.

That doesn’t make it a non-feature, necessarily. Lots of features in lots of software fail to drive that software’s success.

Honestly this whole thread is very pedantic. Popularity doesn't define a feature, and the writer probably just plucked the word "feature" from a few not-great options.

Either way, general grumpiness about Rust being used to write an OS may be a reaction to the hype, but plenty of people have expressed interest in an OS written in Rust, if not for any other purpose than to challenge Rust's basic claims.

Historically, there has been a bigger trade-off between safety and performance, and performance has been much more important.

Besides, there are many many factors determining successes of OSes, often far removed from quality of the software itself (1986 AmigaOS had GUI and multitasking, and still lost to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1).

I wonder what’s the API/ABI of that OS. This is where the language does make a difference.

On most systems the C ABI has been the only ABI for so long that people have forgotten system ABIs are language-specific.

There's a lot of marketing fluff - anyone know what this actually is?

Judging by the specs it runs on, it's an OS for application processors - like the kind in smartphones. They talk a lot about UI features, but not much about the interesting stuff. Is this truly a "new" OS written in Rust? Or is it just a repackaged android with a new GUI and some Rust libraries?

Harvey OS retired, now they do R9, also written in Rust

https://harvey-os.org/2023/04/23/retirement.html

I am always puzzled why Plan 9 is so looked upon instead of Inferno, where the best ideas from UNIX and Plan 9 were combined with a memory safe userspace language.

I think that was part of it - you needed(?) to use Limbo to develop Inferno Apps, whereas Plan 9 uses C.

It's odd, the Vita Nuova website looks unchanged for 20+ years, including a reference to an Inferno plugin for Internet Explorer 4+(!). I wonder if Inferno is being used in production somewhere?

I know Plan 9 was/is used on supercomputers [0], and there was something called CellFS for programming the PS3/Cell architecture. [1]

[0] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/blue_gene/

[1] http://ilab.usc.edu/packages/cell-processor/docs/IBM_redbook...

AFAIK it run on some (old) Lucent VPNs

Just following the footsteps of Huawei, forking existing projects, making superficial changes and tacking a new skin on it.

Claiming to be a new OS when it isn't is the modern China equivalent of Sega's "blast processing", it's marketing fluff to lure customers.

HyperOS and also HarmonyOS2 :).

A global first? And Redox OS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com