MenuetOS is an amazing operating system written entirely in 32 bit x86 assembly. You can develop for Menuet using only Menuet apps and it boots and runs from a 1.44 M Floppy. The GUI is excellent and supports some cool things like transparent and free form windows. The most interesting thing for me was how simple software development can be without eight miles of crap between the developer and the hardware.
Posted by bill at November 7, 2003 05:12 PMthe real shocker is that the standard example program written in c using the win32 api is about the same length as an assembly language program for menuetOS.
Some very informal examination shows that this win32 hello world program takes (without comments).
http://www.paulgriffiths.net/program/c/winhellosrc.html
is 50 lines (1726 characters)
while the sample program for bringing up a windows and displaying text on minuetOS takes
84 lines (1926 chracters)
very comparable, and not what I would have expected considering that C is the higher level language going against a "higher level" api.
I'm not surprised. We carry around so much dreck to support our "conveniences" they cease to be convenient.
Posted by: Bill Glover at November 9, 2003 12:10 PM (Spam: 50%)