Item — HN Reader

All 3 of the big OSes have extreme amounts of business critical code from the 90s and 80s. Code that is complete spaghetti, with no automated tests, no peer reviews, no changes for decades, and written in C of course (objective C in case of apple)

That alone is a reason to start over with a from-scratch mes desktop OS implementation

Microsoft and Apple both have more than enough money to do it. It would be a ~10 year project. It would not make money which is why it’ll never be done.

3 comments

1. Starting from scratch is rarely a good idea. 2. It always sounds like a better idea than it actually is. 3. Item 2 is true even if you think you've accounted for item 1.

Is there something specific that you want that cannot be implemented reasonably on existing systems?

Unless you have a specific compelling benefit that only a rewrite can grant, focused narrow rewrites are the way.

Ok but if "it has a lot of ugly code" is the best reason to re-invent the OS, then we're not off to a very good start. It needs a purpose that the user can relate to.

Then again iOS is underpinned by a lot of that same code. I don't know if it needs to be that deep of a rewrite.

iOS is something of a ship of Theseus I believe, all the code has already been rewritten over the years, only the core architecture itself is unchanged from the 90s but with a modernized codebase