This Week in Redox 13

By Ticki on Tuesday, March 29, 2016

This is the 13th post of a series of blog posts tracking the development and progress of Redox, the Rust operating system. If you want to know more about Redox in general, visit our Github page.

(edited by Ticki)

PSA

If you have any questions, ideas, or are curious about Redox, we recommend joining #redox on irc.mozilla.org or our Discourse forum!

What’s new in Redox?

We’ve been featured on InfoWorld (“Rust’s Redox OS Could Show Linux a Few New Tricks”), Linux.com, Phoronix, OSNews, and probably more.
@ticki has has started libmalloc, an efficient userspace memory allocator for Redox.
@skylerberg has added tilde expansion for Ion.
Thanks to the awesome rust-lang team, we finally got naked function. :tada: :tada: :tada:. For an explanation of this, see this comment.
@ticki has ported his termion to Redox, and as a result started games-for-redox, a collection of text-based games (see pictures):
- @eghiorzi added reversi.
- @paezao added snake.
- @ticki added minesweeper.
- @ticki added ice (ice sliding puzzle).
- @jhod0 added flappy bird.
- @ticki added h4xx3r, for hacking like 4chan.
@ticki has started magnet, the package manager of Redox. It is still very much work-in-progress.
@jackpot51 made a GUI version of @lazyoxen’s calc.
@ticki has made libextra, containing everything libstd lacks of.
@jackpot51 has improved the real hardware support (specifically, the PS/2 driver is fixed).
@ticki has fixed a serious bug in GetSlice, potentially resulting in kernel panics.
@ca1ek has been working on Tetrahedrane, a software 3D renderer for Redox.
@jackpot51 added a Redox screenfetch-like utility.
@hgrecco has added cut to coreutils.
The SYSALLOC syscall is removed in favor of the userspace allocator.
@pythoneer has been working on pixelcannon, another 3D software rendering engine for Redox.
We finally reached 3,500 stargazers.
@ticki has added a Code of Conduct. It is based on Rust’s with some slight modifications.
@jackpot51 has been working on IO from userspace.
@jackpot51 has improved the performance of the terminal redraws.
@nounoursheureux has added an initial implementation of fs::copy and fs::rename.
@jackpot51 has exposed the async orbclient flag, enabling non-blocking GUIs.
@ticki, @jackpot51, and @stratact has improved the book in a number of ways:
- “drawbacks of microkernels” chapter.
- Improved wording.
- Explanation of what programs fits into the upstream distribution.
- Various improvements based on people’s feedback.
@jackpot51 has fixed many bugs with the management of the memory.
@ticki introduced the Red Ox, our mascot!
@jackpot51 has improved the device detection.
@ticki has added PR and issue templates
@guillaum1 has been working on porting his Jainja, a Java-to-C transpiler + VM for Java (supports Java 1.5 features). This means that Redox can run basic Java programs now!
@stratact has refactored wc for more clean and consistent code.
@jackpot51 has added message of the day.
@stratact has refactored the Place trait in orbtk, and is working on menus for OrbTK.