A managed OS

We have ever heard about singularity the Microsoft project to make an OS in managed language. Most is done in managed mode but some part are done in asm.

And now, we have 2 projects in open source which try to make it all in manged way SharpOS and Cosmos…

Both project have succeed to boot with virtual machine.

Cosmos have made a compiler which convert the IL(intermediate language) code in assembler code. So code is compile just in time but ahead of time. (The mono compiler can ever done it). I do not know if there are differences between mono AOT and Cosmos one…

SharpOS use another way. They build a PE file with MultiBoot header.

SharpOS have a great documentation to explain how it work, especially on boot time.

If you want to learned how work an OS there is another good project named SOS for Simple OS (fork from KOS) which is lead by a French Linux magazine. This is in C/C++ but you have a lot of documentation which come from articles in the magazine freely available. All article are in french but it can help if you want to help SharpOS or Cosmos and know nothing about kernel.

html5 working draft published!

Since 1999, there is no new features in HTML language.

The language is really poor and have not evolved with the needs of user. To fix that, we can use javascript to manipulate the DOM but it is take a lot of lines of code to do small things. We have AJAX to have better performance by not refresh the whole page.

And we have Flash, Silverlight, Moonlight, XUL,… which are basically plug-in over your browser to add a lot of cool things to your browser.

And a lot of people talked about who will win … but we have forget the HTML standard which have not evolved during a long time. The working draft of HTML 5 seems very promising.

This is a working draft, so all can evolved but we can see what they want to do…

To sum up they add a lot of missing things witch is done with AJAX, javascript, …

So, I will try to sum up what we will have in this HTML5:

• Document structure: section, header, footer, article, aside will be useful to cut your document in area
• Multimedia flag: video, audio will replace the object flag and will be more easier to use and canvas will allow dynamic drawing (ever in Firefox 2)
• forms: the specification of WHATWG show what will be done here. But nothing is currently in the working draft. But we can hope new input attributs: calendar, timepicker, email, … and repeater to avoid to have a list same flags…
• new controls: Datagrid to make tabular or hierarchical set of rows of elements. progress and meter will be cool to show to user that he have to wait. it is better than a GIF or an Ajax progress bar. And we have some other things as command and menu
• area post: it will replace Ajax for a lot of things… here we have datatemplate, rule and nest flag to manage the template dynamically. I have not understand all here but sounds promising….
• storing data in database: but in local and this will be persistant during the session.
• catch drag&drop without javascirpt

This draft will evolved maybe in good maybe in bad way but hope standard will bring a lot of missing things. I do not think we will have all features of flash/silverlight in HTML5 but we will get a lot of cool new things. We will still be far from rich browser plugin but we get lot of cool new things in standard…