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John Carmack's arguments against building a custom XR OS at Meta

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520 points OlympicMarmoto | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:45 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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agsnu ◴[29 Aug 25 19:11 UTC] No.45068169[source]▶
Huawei seem pretty committed to building their own OS and uncoupling from the Western technology stack in total

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi24/presentation/chen-h...

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ronsor ◴[29 Aug 25 20:55 UTC] No.45069290[source]▶
The only reason Chinese companies can even get away with these big projects is because of state backing and state objectives. By itself, the market doesn't support a new general-purpose OS at this point.
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const_cast ◴[29 Aug 25 22:19 UTC] No.45070066[source]▶
You're downvoted but you're 100% correct.

It makes absolutely zero financial sense to create a new general purpose operating system.

That's billions of lines of code. With a B. And that's just the code - getting it to work with hardware?

Do YOU want to talk to 10,000 hardware vendors and get them on board? No! Nobody does! That's just money burning!

But, there are valid political reasons for creating a new general purpose OS.

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1. com2kid ◴[30 Aug 25 07:16 UTC] No.45072583{3}[source]▶
It is a lot less if you are aiming to support a small set of platforms, don't need general driver support for everything possible accessory and peripheral under the sun, and if your file system usage is limited.

If you are building for a single abstraction, code gets much simpler, instead of building a platform that multiple abstractions can then be built on top of.