jsmp

Built mk, Aster’s native, Plan 9-inspired alternative to make! 😁 It supports dependency graphs, incremental builds, parallel jobs, and loading default build rules and recipes.

Most companies using AI today are paying the same agent to build their “innovative” products. They ship similar products with similar bad taste and flaws. The code was never the painful part it was deferring it and thinking on what is worth building. AI reduced the cost of bad ideas.

If you happen to be building a libc for your OS and using Clang, PSA: LLVM offers one, so you can focus on the glue with the OS and leave wchar, cos, strrchr, and all those seemingly endless functions alone. Learned that the hard way. github.com/llvm/llvm-pr...

Tried porting Clang to Aster. Turns out C++ has an impressive talent for documenting everything my OS doesn’t implement yet. I’ll tell you all about it… later this decade. 😅

Clang provides libc++, libc++abi, compiler-rt and libunwind, but they build on your libc. That meant improving Aster libc while implementing locales, wchar, signals, TLS, threads, mmap(), dlopen(), and the POSIX foundation they expect.

Went to draft an article using raise (a SSG written in C), and had forgotten it can display a QR code for opening the served pages on my iPhone. It brought back the struggle of getting the QR code rendering right, which I'd completely forgotten. Unfortunately, also how ugly that particular code is.

One nice aspect of building a POSIX-oriented operating system is that many of its components can stand on their own. psh, Aster's shell, builds and runs on macOS, making it easy to iterate on new features and continuously refine the user experience.

You often hear people talk about how they used X to build Y, how great or painful X was, and how it changed the way they think. How often do you hear that nowadays with AI? Most people don't even know which algorithms are being used or what their limitations are until they run into one.

Aster’s terminal app (term) now has much better xterm compatibility and proper PTY handling across the system (gettty, PTYs, and major libc support). Also landed an early workspace/window compositor layer. #osdev #toyOS

Another addition is a shared --fmt= output layer through a new libfmt, enabling CLI tools to expose structured output modes such as JSON. The library focuses on human-readable terminal output first, while also making data easy to export and consume. #aster #osdev

Aster’s terminal app (term) now has much better xterm compatibility and proper PTY handling across the system (gettty, PTYs, and major libc support). Also landed an early workspace/window compositor layer. #osdev #toyOS

Another addition is a shared --fmt= output layer through a new libfmt, enabling CLI tools to expose structured output modes such as JSON. The library focuses on human-readable terminal output first, while also making data easy to export and consume. #aster #osdev

You know, you must take things serious when Elfs start to carry a Sword, Xword and even Sxword.

Back to Aster (my toy OS), a raw binary bootloader with minimal FAT support now loads an ELF64 kernel (no GRUB). The kernel executes ELF64 binaries and includes an early shared library loader (for libc and libcore).

The ideia that a machine had no pleasure in creating an artwork to me is pale in contrast to the fact that a human did not spent years honing the skills needed to understand and express oneself. A style is not only a perspective but also the sum of creative ways to deal with our own limitations.