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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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webdevver ◴[] No.45067249[source]
tbh linux has quite a bit of cruft in it these days at the syscall and interface layer.

if youre apple, it does make sense to do stuff from scratch. i think in a way, software guys wind up building their own prisons. an api is created to solve problem X given world Y, but world Y+1 has a different set of problems - problems that may no longer be adequately addressed given the api invented for X.

people talk about "rewrite everything in rust" - I say, why stop there? lets go down to the metal. make every byte, every instruction, every syscall a commodity. imagine if we could go all the way back to bare metal programming, simply by virtue of the LLM auto-coding the bootloader, scheduler, process manager, all in-situ.

the software world is full of circularities like that. we went from Mainframe -> local -> mainframe, why not baremetal -> hosted -> baremetal?

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xantronix ◴[] No.45067825[source]
Apple doesn't do a lot of baremetal development from scratch that I'm aware of. The Lightning to HDMI dongle bootstraps an XNU kernel with an AirPlay decoder into 256MB RAM, for instance.
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1. pjmlp ◴[] No.45072357[source]
Boot loader firmware, initially done in a Safe C dialect, nowadays one of the reasons Embedded Swift came to be.