>>I'll be honest with you. I'll tell you how awesome it is. :-) LOL!
>I am sure it is, actually I envy you... You are doing two things that, when I was
>younger, had as goals 1) Writing an OS 2) Creating a Language and writing its
>compiler.

This will actually be my 4th compiler, and my 3rd assembler. For compilers, my first was called MICROLAN and was a cross between the FoxBASE+ DOS-based @ SAY commands, and Norton's Batch Enhancer (be.exe) application from way back in the DOS days. The second was called q/Language and was a derivative of C with a more rigid syntax requirement. The third was something I called a rapid development compiler (no optimization, but supported full edit-and-continue through a new ABI) which was a greatly relaxed C/C++ compiler without full C++ support, but only the class, simple inheritance, no templates, and some relaxed syntax requirements (such as char* foo = (void*)blah being legal without generating an error, only a warning, because ultimately you're only passing a pointer to a pointer). And so on.

And I have written several assemblers and disassemblers for the x86.


>I actually bought (and read!) books

I approached my development somewhat different. A man named Alan Earhart introduced me to MASM 1.0 and x86 assembly. I was enthralled. I had bought an i386 architecture book from a local bookstore. Later I ordered the 486 and later Pentium manuals from Intel's Literature Center (the manuals are now called IA-32 Instruction Set Architecture Manuals and can be downloaded as PDFs), and began to study them. I learned the i386, i486 and Pentium inside-and-out. I learned the architecture from the ground up.

After doing that, I sat back with my philosopher's hat on and began to ponder: "If I were going to write an operating system to make THAT architecture work ... how would I do it?" I came up with the design for Exodus, and spent the next 6 years of my life doing nothing but that in i386 assembly. I had only a regular Pentium-133 machine. I did all of my development in MS-DOS 6.22 on the VGA monitor. Then I would write my OS image to a floppy disk and reboot, using the VGA for normal display, and a parallel monochrome monitor for my debugger.

Slow slow going. Took me years to get it to boot reliably on many different motherboards because there were always very subtle nuances which would cause it to crash. Today, it is fairly stable and boots in all the major emulators.


> for both things (my mother just moved and
>called me the other day telling me that she threw away all my books, otherwise
>I probably still had them :(), but then life steered me away from it, so... I envy
>you!

It was a lot of my life. I gave it my all, and yet I failed to complete it. And my OS, while functional and well-designed, is lacking many features because it lacks driver support. It is only PS/2 keyboard and mouse, floppy disk, etc. Though, it is a good template for anyone looking to write their own kernel and build atop it.

In the last five years I've learned some things related to kernel development that would have me altering my design slightly as I would now target other hardware architectures using some less-specialized solutions. As such, my ultimate plans are to complete Exodus for the x86, and then write Armodus for the ARM CPU. Then come back and complete Exodus-64, and Armodus-64.
http://www.visual-freepro.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=14

We'll see how it goes.


>(And no, no sermons welcomed about envy being a Capital Punishment thing! :))

:-) Understood.

Apart from possibly my technical knowledge and abilities, there isn't much to be envious of me anyway. My faith and belief in Jesus has put me at odds with most everybody in my life. The railing I receive here on this forum, and on other forums, is echoed at all points in my life. I am criticized and ostracized continually for believing that what scripture teaches is correct. It is a very difficult walk to be almost always entirely alone with regards to having other people of similar beliefs in your life. For example, even my fellow church members keep me at arm's length.