Linus Torvalds reveals plans to rewrite the Linux kernel using the web dev langue: PHP. The news has cause controversy among the tech community

Finally i’m gonna be able to contribute!

  • Ephera
    74·
    5 months ago

    Good thing that this isn’t actually possible…

    • morrowind
      901·
      5 months ago

      Don’t tempt fate. There are already two kernels written in javascript

      • Ephera
        17·
        5 months ago

        How? You’d need to compile it down to machine code somehow, for the processor to have any clue how to run it. And you’d need some custom library with custom compile instructions, to be able to control memory allocations, memory addresses etc…

        I did a quick search and found two operating systems written in JS, both of which cop out when it comes to the kernel. Did you maybe mix it up with those?

        • frezik@midwest.social
          13·
          5 months ago

          There’s almost always at least a little ASM sprinkled into any kernel, so that’s not a big deal.

          OTOH, there is the factor of “you know how Chrome takes up 2GB per tab? What if that was a whole OS?”

        • morrowind
          3·
          5 months ago

          Maybe I did, I haven’t looked any of them carefully

      • Ephera
        6·
        5 months ago

        I mean, I’m a bit out of my water there, both in terms of the featureset of PHP and what’s actually needed for a kernel, but I’m still gonna go with no.

        For one, PHP uses reference counting + garbage collection for memory management. That’s normally done by the language runtime, which you won’t have when running baremetal.

        Maybe you could implement a kernel, which does as few allocations as possible (generally a good idea for a kernel, but no idea, if it’s possible with PHP), and then basically just let it memory leak until everything crashes.
        Then again, the kernel is responsible for making processes crash when they have a memory leak. Presumably, our PHP kernel would just start overwriting data from running processes and eventually overwrite itself in memory(?). Either way, it would be horrendous.

        Maybe you could also try to implement some basic reference counting into your own PHP code, so that your own code keeps track of how often you’ve used an object in your own code. Certainly doesn’t sound like fun, though.

        Well, and secondly, I imagine, you’d also still need an extension of the language, to be able to address actual memory locations and do various operations with them.

        I know from Rust, that they’ve got specific functions in the stdlib for that, see for example: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/ptr/index.html#functions
        Presumably, PHP does not have such functions, because its users aren’t normally concerned with that.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
          31·
          5 months ago

          Right – I’m not saying you could build a compiler then just go to town. You would still have to build all the tools, using PHP, to interact with hardware, the way other languages do. A horrible idea, lol, but interesting, sort of. Since at its core as long as you can execute logic and read/write to memory, you could do it, I think

          • Ephera
            3·
            5 months ago

            But that is what I mean with it needing an extension of the language.

            So, I’m not saying you could just build a library that calls existing PHP functions to make it all work. Rather I’m saying there’s certain machine code instructions, which just cannot be expressed in PHP. And we need those machine code instructions for actually managing memory. So, I am talking about reading/writing to memory not being possible, unless we resort to horrible hacks.

            Since we are building our own compiler anyways, we could add our own function-stubs and tell our compiler to translate them to those missing machine code instructions. But then that is a superset of PHP. It wouldn’t be possible in PHP itself.

            Again, I’m not entirely sure about the above, but my web search skills couldn’t uncover any way to actually just read from a memory address in PHP.

            • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
              21·
              5 months ago

              I mean, I think we’re saying the same thing, you just have better vocabulary than I :)

    • felixwhynot@lemmy.world
      4·
      5 months ago

      I did use a crypto mining OS that was Linux but with lots of scripts that were written in… PHP! I never thought I’d see it.

    • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
      254·
      5 months ago

      PHP and C are both fine languages, they have their strengths and their weaknesses. They’re tools and if you feel the need to shit on them then you clearly need more practice using a diversity of languages.

      • toastboy79@kbin.earth
        8·
        5 months ago

        PHP is probably a fine language, my issue is I suffered dealing with so many shitty applications written in php when I was still coming up through the ranks of IT.

        God the number of broken WordPress installs and shitty WordPress plugins.

        • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
          8·
          5 months ago

          I understand your pain - the real reason for that is that PHP was the first “hobbyist” programming language so a lot of self trained folks built websites that ended up slowly morphing into successful businesses.

          One of the things I’m actually most proud of from the PHP community is that around 5.2 the maintainers looked around and saw sites like Quora and StackOverflow were littered with the worst fucking PHP advice endorsing functions like mysql_query and ill-advised features like magic_quotes so the community invested a lot of resources in purging answers that preached anti-patterns and replace them with non-terrible answers.

          I work in PHP and it’s perfectly serviceable now, we’ve got strict typing, namespaces, lambdas, all the nice shit you’d expect in a modern language.