This project is about an operating system and, more than just the whole, it is also about the constituent parts, and this view is important, because otherwise groups that would have an interest and could benefit from its success would miss out, so this post will present the reasons to each possible interest group.
If you have interest, please join the communities, in this way you will be helping them to grow while being able to interact and stay up to date with what is going on.
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Let value be given to those who make it worth, so we are not the ones to convince that thinking of the common good is a mistake, so we do not do justice of this reality where our satisfaction, freedom and security are of no importance. If, in technology's world, the open-source is one of those that represents thinking of the common good, do not despise it, support those who benefits you; otherwise, only those who exploits you will remain.
The principles of this project tends to make it an excellent operating system for desktop use, the stability of a coherent system with less room for failure allows you to worry about what you want to do and forget about the system itself ("it just works"), the low resource consumption allows the power of your computer to be directed to the applications it uses, as it should be.
The use of arcan as a multimedia system is a notable difference, it provides a secure and modern alternative to X.org while being just (even more) as powerful, without sacrificing convenience. It aligns with the project's principles and has interoperability good enough to claim itself as "a single-user, user-facing, networked overlay operating system."
This project creates an environment that may be very comfortable for development. The use of a functional package manager provides a reproducible environment and makes it easy to manage and test different versions of development tools. The alignment with the POSIX standard may set it as a good reference for deployment portability.
In this topic, two big projects are in development, a programming language and the library tertium:
The vesper language is an (almost purely) functional programming language with a powerful typing system (e.g. turing-complete, dependent types), high parallelization potential and automatic resource management during compilation-time (i.e. no garbage collector). The biggest difference is to offer all of that in a consistent recursive syntax (akin to lambda/lisp), so features are a natural part of the language, no need to fight the compiler for memory safety, or suffer to deal and describe complex types.
The library tertium is a system programming library written in C use in place of the POSIX libc (see the comparison), with a focus on security and interoperability while providing a large set of modules to let you take care of the problem instead of worrying about reinventing the wheel each time.
The library simia can be mentioned as a complement to tertium, it provides a POSIX compatibility layer on top of it, while taking advantage of its portability, security and performance.
Simplicity and stability are essential qualities to the administration of a system and those are foundation goals of this project. It makes use of a more cohesive and simplified structure (e.g the unified file-system hierarchy), provides tools like redo for automated builds, cdb for fast constant-databases, venus a functional package manager, and arbor a reproducible build system, which implies a reproducible environment.
The arbor in particular may be useful even for other projects, as one of its official repositories are exclusive for statically linked packages, that means they can be distributed across the same OS without worrying about dependencies, in addition to that it can be used to populate local repositories even if you are to use another package manager (the idea is that the packages are "agnostic").
As the parts have been made known, we can talk about the current distribution in the building, where all the pieces come together to build a complete system. Glacies is an operating system composed of the Eltanin userland, tools aligned with the project's principles (such as arcan, s6 and musl) and the Linux® kernel.
This is a large project and it is at a point where one of these directions can be focused. Any one of these, focused on, can quickly be developed for use, any of these advancing, and bringing attention, brings the expansion of the others.
With this, I hope to provide an overview of it. If you are interested, please participate and take part in the poll to help gather this collective view of interest. At the very least join the communities and follow its progress.
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