Andreas Kling
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2021–2022
1:19:39 · 82K views · Mar 5, 2021
Andreas Kling ports the game Diablo to SerenityOS, his from-scratch Unix-like operating system, using the devilutionX project. The roughly 80-minute session shows what porting third-party software to the OS involves.
HN commenters recommend it as a demonstration of SerenityOS's hackability and fast iteration across all layers of the system.
6 comments from Hacker News
One of SerenityOS goals I find as its most compelling USP is that it aims to be a "pure" OS free of any 3rd Party libs/binaries so that everything is in the project source tree and nothing needs to rely on or sync with any other upstream project, resulting in anyone can always fix & test any issue or add any feature immediately. A good highlight of this is in the Diablo port to SerenityOS: this video Whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in a 1hr sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port. It was a characteristic Andreas experienced at Apple where all code and expertise for macOS was maintained in-house. This does mean everything inc. the OS, Kernel & all default Apps like the Browser needs to be developed from scratch for SerenityOS, but its Browser is making good progress as seems the SerenityOS project and development approach resonates with a lot of devs where it's been able to attract a vibrant community with a number of active contributors. I see a number of benefits of this approach starting with SerenityOS has to be one of the best code-bases to study and learn about OS development where you can see how all components integrate together in a consistent code-base (as well as being able to follow it being developed in real-time with 100s of videos on youtube.com/andreaskling), it enables cohesive behavior and appearance with everything using the same singular library set, it's e
Thrilled Andreas has managed to receive enough community support to be able to take this big step and is able to focus on Serenity OS fulltime. SerenityOS is an inspiring from scratch grassroots OS effort which plans to build the entire POSIX OS, Kernel and core Apps from scratch, one of the Apps their is their LibWeb browser engine complete with their own LibJS JS VM which already passes the ECMAScript test suite. One of its USPs is that the entire OS is contained within its single source tree where anyone can make changes to its code-base and instantly reboot the OS in seconds with the changes, never seen this done for an OS before, the turn around time allows for some impressive dev iteration speed. A good preview of this hackability is in his Diablo port, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in 1 sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port: this video Andreas videos on developing LibWeb/LibJS is one of the best resources I've found explaining how to implement a multi-process web browser, e.g. in this video he goes through the HTML Specs which have enough info in them to develop a HTML spec parser whose behavior is the same across all browser engines: [LINK] It's been awesome to see LibWeb/LibJS evolve over time, every time he sits down it gets a bit more capable. Typically it's to implement features for rendering a different website. Here's a nice example where LibWeb gains missin
Maybe, but I've not seen anyone iteratively make changes to all layers of the OS and get instant feedback as Andreas frequently does. The Diablo port is a good example of this, whether it's missing C++ APIs, unsupported lang features, missing SDL port impl, toggling kernel features - it all gets done in a 1hr sit down session to produce a shiny new Diablo port. this video Another nice quality of SerenityOS is that the entire OS is written in modern C++ with everything being written from scratch to use the standard AK libraries which the entire OS and components use, i.e. there isn't any existing App that brings in their own string types or other utils.
Haven't heard of this project till seeing this post. Checked out his youtube channel and the video on porting Diablo to SerenityOS in an hour is pretty interesting to watch if you've ever wondered what its like to port software. this video
Not sure what your source for ”doesn’t support 3rd party software” is, so it’s unclear what that actually means, but there are numerous examples on Andreas’ YouTube channel about porting software to Serenity, e.g. Diablo [1]. Maybe the text you read refers to the OS itself and all first party software being written without external dependencies? [1] this video