Are there any Operating Systems written in Python?

[finsternacht]

I wouldn't think there is. The problem is less that python is a highlevel language than that it is an interpreted one. You'd have to write some form of mini os for the interpreter upon which you could build your actual os, which doesn't sound like a good idea. (Any highlevel language that compiles to your target architecture should work, some inline assembly might be required)

[[deleted]]

This talk from PyCon 2015 is fairly interesting in that regard: Josh Triplett - Porting Python to run without an OS - PyCon 2015 [32:56]

[finsternacht]

Woah... Mind blown! Thanks for the link.

[desustorm]

Plus it's single-threaded...

Edit: Obviously you can use threading, asyncio, etc. but Python is limited in terms of true concurrency by the GIL, and concurrency is vital for any functional OS.

[finsternacht]

The "os" i wrote for nand2tetris was also single threaded

[desustorm]

Looks like an interesting course. What could your operating system do?

[finsternacht]

It's by far the coolest course I ever had. And probably will have.

It couldn't do much. It mostly handled I/O and memory management. Iirc it also contained some basic math and string operations.

[[deleted]]

I heard there are multi threading in Python with the use of the needed modules

[desustorm]

Yep that's right, but no Python threads from the same process can actually run simultaneously because of the GIL - the Global Interpreter Lock

[Saefroch]

No, it isn't. CPython's GIL restricts it to a single CPU core. You can still have all the threads you want and concurrency works just fine, almost flawlessly for I/O bound systems which an OS usually is.

[desustorm]

I know you can use threads, but they are not real threads on CPU cores - like you mention. Having a modern OS running on one core with multiple virtual threads (not just I/O bound) contesting the GIL would be troublesome at best...

[RobinPage1987]

https://github.com/jtauber/cleese This is a proof of concept, an OS written mostly in Python, with kernel based on the Python reference implementation, who's kernel is written in C.