Thread by @SarahJamieLewis

I spent my recent evenings writing an operating system in an assembly language that I also developed to compile to a custom bytecode that I also designed to run on an virtual machine that I also implemented.

A meditation on recursive complexity and what actually makes me happy.

It is completely useless. All that work, and you can only run a few commands, and one of them is QUIT.

I have never loved a piece of software more.

The kernel is 832 lines of custom assembly. ~300 are dedicates to embedding binary data like font bitmaps.

Terrifying assembly

This weekend my plan is implement enough of a shell for the operating system so it can do some proper self-introspection and self-modification.

My latest project on the adventure of discovering what makes my brain happy is giving it a system suitable for fractal diving into.

I pushed the source code for the VM, Assembler and OS here for those interested. Docs are still a work in progress and probably reflect my thinking at the time and not what is actually implements.

git.openprivacy.ca/sarah/boo-os/s…

As the readme says. This is a meditation on recursive complexity. I was already set on writing a new language and building one from the ground up on a custom instruction set seemed like a great idea.

This project has explicitly no point other than to make me happy.

This thread got way more attention that I thought it would. I deeply underestimated Twitter's desire for my silly systems projects.

If you liked this, you might also like that time I spent a weekend tricking a chess AI into letting me win:

https://twitter.com/SarahJamieLewis/status/1333582460173512704

Shell now has a JUMP command which allows you to jump to any place in memory. It is very fun.

Indirect Jump is a cursed instruction so I definitely had to include it.