Emacs Turns 50
Emacs debuted at MIT in 1976, bringing programmers a full-screen text editor that remains widely used today. Its roots in TECO and a culture of sharing helped shape the free software movement and GNU/Linux. (technologyreview.com)
Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs
github.com31 points5 comments
Moxnox 1.0 is a hobby operating system that combines Windows NT-inspired system interfaces with support for Unix-like software recompiled for its platform. It uses PE-format binaries and NT-style system calls, while providing a GNU-based environment and a growing collection of ports, including Bash, GCC for amd64, Python, Git, LLVM, Rust, and common command-line tools. Its filesystem is Btrfs, and the project is designed to build itself: users can compile Moxnox on a running Moxnox system. The roughly 130,000-line C++ OS runs on amd64 and aarch64, with support for devices such as NVMe and SATA storage, USB input, and virtio networking and graphics.
The release is usable for experimentation but remains incomplete and explicitly not production-ready. Its Btrfs implementation handles basic use but has not been hardened, and the maintainers advise mounting only disposable filesystems. There is no GUI, security model, multi-user support, timezone handling, keyboard-layout support, or full locale support. Performance also has known bottlenecks, including a slow heap allocator and TCP networking, alongside memory-management and cache issues. The README provides QEMU test instructions, installation steps, hardware requirements, and build guidance using Docker-based cross-compilers. On amd64, it targets x86-64-v3; aarch64 requires ARMv8.1 LSE atomics and ACPI. The project is best understood as a substantial systems-development experiment rather than a general-purpose replacement for established operating systems.
Summary generated by AI from the linked article. hn.today is not affiliated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.
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