LoseThos

LoseThos is an x86_64, open source, free, public domain operating system. It's a live CD, so you can play around immediately with or without installing.

Note: You cannot run LoseThos under the Linux qemu emulator because qemu is not 64-bit, so boot the CD.

LoseThos is for programming as entertainment. It empowers programmers with kernel privilege because it's fun. It allows full access to everything because it's fun. It has no bureaucracy because it's fun. It's the way it is by choice because it's fun. LoseThos is in no way a Windows or Linux wannabe -- that would be pointless. LoseThos is not trying to win a prize for low resource usage or run on pathetic hardware. Low line count is a goal, though. It's 100,000 lines of code including a 64-bit compiler, tools and a graphics library. It's strictly 64-bit and could be configured to function with 32 Meg or less RAM, but who cares! Where do you get a x86_64 machine with less than 32 Meg RAM? With no multimedia, it's hard to run out of memory on a modern home computer.

A bigger goal is making applications low line count. "Hello World" takes one line of code. You can put graphics on the screen with two lines of code. You don't need to include header files or mess with namespaces. It has a scoping system, though, with tasks inheriting symbols of parents and all system-wide symbols and code in the Adam (as in Eve) task's heap.

LoseThos uses some tricks to keep line count down, like processing whole files. It has a flat, identity mapped virtual-to-physical address map, the same for all tasks. It updates the whole screen 60 times a second instead of trying to keep track of what has changed. The most demanding application is a full screen video game, so it might as well be optimize for that instead of trying to get idle low. It uses the same compiler for the command line as for programs and it uses the same viewer/editor for the command line, help system, forms and dialogs.

LoseThos is not trying to be bullet-proof -- it's for home computers, not mainframes where many users suffer when a crash occurs. It reboots in 2 seconds plus BIOS time. It's no worse than a hung task in Windows or Linux. I know people obsess on this topic. You know how the last 20% of a project takes 80% of the time? LoseThos is an order of magnitude simpler by not trying to be bullet-proof.

There are two programmers who will work on LoseThos -- the user and I. It is for programming as entertainment, and I mean that. Why would you buy a 3rd party program to run on a system with crappy graphics that can crash? There are no scalablity issues. Imagine LoseThos more similar in usage to a 8-bit non-networked home computer's ROM than to Windows or Linux, though, it is 64-bit and far more than that. You are free to access anything documented or undocumented in the system source code -- have fun! I have fond memories of the days when average users typed-in programs from magazines and tinkered with them.

LoseThos was designed from scratch with a clean slate and has no compatibility with anything else. Source code is ASCII plus binary graphics data. It has a new language roughly based C/C++. It's more than C and less than C++ so, maybe, it's C+. I took every opportunity to improve things once I made a clean break with the past. That's another reason LoseThos has value -- it is innovative.