Has anyone gotten a proof of concept or something working?
Somebody made metal + vulkan on servo.
https://kvark.github.io/3d/api/2016/12/17/webmetal.html
A good step to right direction. But not sure why we need browsers in the first place if we can run it naively…
Not sure where I found this link, either on this forum or another… It is a fantastic talk.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript
A lot of what has been discussed here is very similar to what’s being worked on in the Nebulet project:
1 Like
@palodequeso Since you first posted, a Rust-based alternative to Electron has emerged:
Your idea wasn’t that crazy before, but with Tauri it might not even be called radical anymore 
1 Like
To a non technical reader, Tauri sounds absolutely ideal for making Redox into a user friendly system for casual users. It appears to me that it borrows the web app philosophy of Google Chrome and runs with it. How might these two systems be expected to compare in practice?
Kind of a side discussion, JS is superior to Python in many ways (far more fast, better FP support, stronger cult community), If you guys are going the linux route and throwing python everywhere it might be more pragmatic to use JS as your default scripting language instead.
Interesting idea. I suspect it is rather a broader topic than this discussion of a framework for apps and worthy of a new thread.
Further thought on @MasonEG’s suggestion: Whilst of no technical consequence, adopting such a blatantly web based technology as Javascript instead of Python does riff quite nicely off Redox’s web inspired philosophy of ‘everything as an url’.
The same would presumably apply also to Tauri; maybe even more so.
adopting such a blatantly web based technology as Javascript instead of Python does riff quite nicely off Redox’s web inspired philosophy of ‘everything as an url’.
The “Everything is a URL” thing doesn’t really have anything to do with web technologies. As far as I can understand, it’s a less rigid version of “Everything is a File”. The point of making everything a file is that you can use the same set of tools to access and manipulate a wide range of resources, however this leads to weird situations when you try to force something that doesn’t fit in the same structure as everything else, so Redox tries to have a version of the same principle, but it has a set of different schemes for different kinds of files instead of just one.
At least that’s what I understood from https://doc.redox-os.org/book/ch04-10-everything-is-a-url.html
I suppose at a technical level you are correct. Whilst ‘everything is a url’ does not mean it works the same as the WWW, it must also be added that Javascript of course is not merely a web technology anymore!
But the web can perhaps permeate through Redox as a metaphor in the same way as today’s systems use ideas such as ‘files’ and ‘desktops’ to organise our data, even though these are abstractions (data really exists as a string of 1s and 0s on the hard drive). Instead they are concepts that previous generations of system designers have adopted from the office environment that was familiar to them. The web is familiar to us nowadays, so it makes sense to adopt it as a useful metaphor within the system architecture.
How would you apply the web metaphor to operating systems?
By mixing your metaphors of course! 
2 Likes
Your proposed scripting language rather neatly shares bloodline with that used for the system. Javascript was invented by Netscape, whose browser development was later taken over by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla would then of course become the originator of Rust!
It might also be worth keeping an eye on the progress of Dart, the Google competitor to Javascript which seems to be gaining popularity.