disclaimer: I really have no idea about OSes, but hey...
Maybe it's a matter of marketing the product and managing expectations, but many of these projects are A ok being "legacy and obsolete" just for the sake of simplicity for introducing basic concepts.
Let's take two random examples.
(1) "let's create 3D graphics from scratch"
It's quite easy to grab "graphics gems" and create a comprehensive tutorial on software renderer. Sure it won't be practical, and sure it will likely end on phong shading, but for those wanting to understand how 3d models are translated into pixels on screen it's way more approachable than studying papers on nanites.
(2) "let's crate a browser from scratch"
It's been widely discussed that creating a new browser today would be complete madness (yet there's Ladybird!), but shaving the scope, even if it wouldn't be able to run most modern websites would be a interesting journey for someone who'd interested in how things work.
PS. Ages ago I've done a Flash webpage that was supposed to mimic a desktop computer for ad campaign for tv show. Webpage acted as a personal computer of main character and people could lurk into it between episodes to read his emails, check his browser history, etc.
I took it as a learning opportunity to learn about OS architecture and spent ungodly amount of unpaid overtime to make it as close to win3.1 running on dos as possible. Was it really an OS? Of course not, but it was a learning opportunity to get a grasp of certain things and it was extremely rewarding to have an easter egg with a command.com you could launch and interact with the system.
Would I ever try to build a real OS. Hell no, I'm not as smart as lcamtuf to invite couple friends for drinks and start Argante. :)
To pick on graphics, since I'm more familiar with that domain, the problem isn't that this tutorial is about software rasterization, it's that the tutorial is a raytracer that doesn't do shading, textures, shadows, or any geometry but spheres, and spends most of its word count talking about implementing the trig functions on fixed-point numbers instead of just using math.h functions on IEEE floats.
That simulated personal computer for a TV character actually sounds really cool. I love the idea that the environment would change from week to week with each new episode. What was the TV show?
Maybe it's a matter of marketing the product and managing expectations, but many of these projects are A ok being "legacy and obsolete" just for the sake of simplicity for introducing basic concepts.
Let's take two random examples.
(1) "let's create 3D graphics from scratch" It's quite easy to grab "graphics gems" and create a comprehensive tutorial on software renderer. Sure it won't be practical, and sure it will likely end on phong shading, but for those wanting to understand how 3d models are translated into pixels on screen it's way more approachable than studying papers on nanites.
(2) "let's crate a browser from scratch" It's been widely discussed that creating a new browser today would be complete madness (yet there's Ladybird!), but shaving the scope, even if it wouldn't be able to run most modern websites would be a interesting journey for someone who'd interested in how things work.
PS. Ages ago I've done a Flash webpage that was supposed to mimic a desktop computer for ad campaign for tv show. Webpage acted as a personal computer of main character and people could lurk into it between episodes to read his emails, check his browser history, etc. I took it as a learning opportunity to learn about OS architecture and spent ungodly amount of unpaid overtime to make it as close to win3.1 running on dos as possible. Was it really an OS? Of course not, but it was a learning opportunity to get a grasp of certain things and it was extremely rewarding to have an easter egg with a command.com you could launch and interact with the system.
Would I ever try to build a real OS. Hell no, I'm not as smart as lcamtuf to invite couple friends for drinks and start Argante. :)