Can the Ruby language be used to build operating systems?

Question

Can the Ruby language be used to create an entire new mobile operating system or desktop operating system ie can it be used in system programming?

Answer 1

Well there are a few operating systems out there right now which use higher-level languages than C. Basically the ruby interpreter itself would need to be written in something low-level, and there would need to be some boot-loading code that loaded a fully-functional ruby interpreter into memory as a standalone kernel. Once the ruby interpreter is bootstrapped and running in kernel-mode (or one of the inner rings ), there would be nothing stopping you from builing a whole OS on top of it.

Unfortunately, it would likely be very slow. Garbage collection for every OS function would probably be rather noticeable. The ruby interpreter would be responsible for basic things like task scheduling and the network stack, which using a garbage-collecting framework would slow things down considerably. To work around this, odds are good that the "performance critical" pieces would still be written in C.

So yes, technically speaking this is possible. But no one in their right mind would try it (queue crazy person in 3... 2...)

Answer 2

For all practical purposes: No.

While the language itself is not suited for such a task, it is imaginable (in some other universe;-) that there a Ruby run-time developed with such a goal in mind.

The only "high level" -- yes, the quotes are there for a reason, I don't consider C very "high level" these days -- language I know of designed for Systems Programming is BitC . (Which is quite unlike Ruby.)

Happy coding.

---

Edit: Here is a list of "Lisp-based OSes" . While not Ruby, the dynamically-typed/garbage-collected nature of (many) Lisp implementations makes for a favorable comparison: if those crazy Lispers can do/attempt it, then so can some Ruby fanatic... or at least they can wish for it ;-) There is even a link to an OCaml OS on the list...

Answer 3

No, not directly

In the same way that Rails is built on top of Ruby, Ruby is built on top of the services that lower layers.. the real OS.. provide.

I suppose one could subset Ruby until it functionally resembled C and then build an OS out of that, but it wouldn't be worth it. Sure, it would have a nice if.. end but C syntax is perfectly usable and we already have C language systems. Also, operating systems don't handle character data very much, so all of the Ruby features to manipulate it wouldn't be as valuable in a kernel.

If we were starting from scratch today we might actually try (as various experimental projects have) to use garbage collected memory allocation in a kernel but we already have OS kernels.

People are making investments at the higher layers rather than redoing work already done. After all, with all the upper level software to run these days, a new kernel would need to present a compatible interface and the question would then be asked "why not just run the nice kernels we already have?".

Now, the application API for a mobile OS could indeed be done for Ruby. So, just as Android apps are written in Java, RubyPhone apps could be written in Ruby. But Ruby might not be the best possible starting point for a rich application platform. Its development so far has been oriented to server-side problems. There exist various graphical interface gems but I don't think they are widely used.

Answer 4

While building a whole OS from scratch in Ruby seems like a multi-billion project (think of all the drivers), a linux kernel module that runs simple ruby scripts does make sense for me - even it was only for prototyping new linux drivers.

Answer 5

basically yes, but with a big disclamer.. which is basically Chris' answer but a different spin on it. Since for kernel performance it would kinda suck to use ruby, you'd probably want to build around a linux-ish kernel and just not load any of the rest of the operating system. This is basically what Android does: the kernel is a fork from Linux (and is maintained close to linux), the console is a webkit screen, and the interpreter is Java with some Android specific libraries. IE, Android is Java masquerading as an OS, .. you could do about the same thing with Ruby instead of Java and only a smallish hit to performance from java