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Brokenwire.NET::Programming

Singularity: open source C# Operating System
· 2008-03-07 11:16 by Thijs Kroesbergen for Brokenwire.NET

The source code for the Microsoft Research project "Singularity" has been published on CodePlex. I’ve written about Cosmos about a month ago and I’ve had many visitors looking for information about a C# operating systems.

I’ve not yet tried to actually run Singularity from the provided sources, but from the "About" page and the supplied documentation it seems that they have a pretty complete implementation.

From the include slide shows you can conclude that Singularity is actually written in SpeC#, a superset of C# (formerly A#). Their runtime is named "Bartok" and translates the MSIL code to x86 binary code.

The mentioned target scenario is "eHome digital-convergence" which means that Singularity could run on devices like Smart Remotes, Set-Top boxes and Media Servers and provide a common platform for these kind of devices.

If the network support is complete enough, Singularity could also be a nice start for embedded (home automation?) projects.

Furthermore they have include a slide deck which says something about the performance of Singularity in comparison with other OS’s (FreeBSD, Linux, Windows). From these slides you can conclude that the performance currently is very similar to these OS’s!

So far I know about three OS implementations in C#:

  1. Cosmos
  2. SharpOS
  3. Singularity

Concluding from my shallow investigations it seems like Singularity is by far the most complete project, with it’s network support and many demo applications. I’m amazed by the size of this project!

One final highlight for pong-addicts: "Pong.cs" is included!

Ps. for the non-native English speakers (just like me): I looked up "Technological singularity" and that actually means something like an intelligence explosion, caused by the self-improving intelligence of machines, which will eventually surpass human intelligence. Think about that for second, does this project prelude the end of mankind?

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