chaburkland / braiNIX

The world's first .bf operating system. New builds weekly.

braiNIX

The world's first .bf operating system.

About

The first of its kind, braiNIX is a project to develop a *NIX OS written entirely in an esoteric Turing language. When fully functional, it will likely be the world's smallest operating system.

Commands

braiNIX currently supports the following basic *NIX commands:

clear du echo exit false logout pwd true whoami

In addition to these, braiNIX also features a new command: bf. This powerful program is used to execute .bf code entered by the user at runtime.

File System

A file system is currently under development.

Other Features

braiNIX supports some advanced input features, such as escape slashes, single- and double-quoting, and inline commenting for commands and their arguments. No other features (command options, substitution, redirection, chaining, backspace / other key combinations, etc...) are currently supported.

Requirements

braiNIX is designed to run on most systems that support the execution of .bf files. These systems fall under two categories:

• Software Interpreters: These are the most commonly-used implementations. These interpreters run on top of a standard OS using general-purpose CPUs.

• Native Hardware: These are rare, but certainly do exist. These implementations have instruction sets that map directly to (or are supersets of) commands present in .bf files. braiNIX is inspired by, and specifically intended for, systems such as these.

Regardless of the chosen implementation, braiNIX has a few base requirements:

Design Requirements

To properly function, braiNIX requires the runtime environment to conform to the following non-standardized design choices:

• Memory cells must be wrapping integers of at least 7 bits. Both signed and unsigned designs are supported, as are finite and infinite designs.

• Memory address overflow / underflow behavior may be left undefined. However, halting behavior is recommended to avoid errant memory corruption. Both finite and infinite designs are supported.

• Input must be recieved via an unbuffered input byte stream. EOF / NULL behavior may be 0, -1, or no-change. Input should not be automatically echoed to the output stream. Both input and output streams should support the 7-bit ASCII printable character set (code points 32 - 126). Code point 10 (line feed), must also be supported.

• To allow for persistent data between sessions, it is strongly recommended to use static cell values that persist after restart / program termination.

• The initial cell address must be the same each time braiNIX is run. For memory management purposes, it is recommended that this be cell #0.

Compatibility And Size Requirements

Each version number uses Semantic Versioning. For braiNIX, the build metadata of each version number indicates its memory requirements.

Given a version number vA.B.C+X.Y.Z:

• A is the major version number. It indicates backward-compatibility with other versions.

• B is the minor version number. It indicates forward-compatibility with other versions.

• C is the patch version number. It indicates forward- and backward-compatibility with other versions.

• X is the size of the final build in kilobytes, rounded up. The runtime environment must have at least this much program memory available to successfully boot braiNIX. This value assumes 8-bit characters as commands, so it is possible to significantly reduce this requirement by mapping the ASCII characters to words as small as 3 bits, if desired.

• Y is the loop depth of the final build. The runtime environment must support at least this many nested loops to successfully boot braiNIX.

• Z is the memory requirement of the final build. The runtime environment must have at least this many memory cells to successfully boot braiNIX. More are required for error-free execution.

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Want to help write braiNIX? Fork it for an interesting side-project, then open a pull request! Help with tooling, tests, and documentation is also greatly appreciated. Check out the contributing guide for more info.