Re: RISC OS
RISC OS is an impressive bit of software, but the fact that it is written in 32-bit ARM assembler (which was a somewhat sensible decision back in the 1980s, when it was written) makes it a dead end. It can't even run on the 64-bit-only ARM variants, which are becoming increasingly common.
AFAIR, RISC OS was not Acorn's first go at an OS for their ARM-based machines. There was a project written in (IIRC) Modula2, but that was far from ready by the time the first Archimedes computer hardware was finished, so Acorn made ARTHUR (some jokingly said it was short for "ARM OS by Thursday"), which took many elements from the OS from the BBC Micro (which was written in 6502 assembly language) and added a very limited GUI. This was after a year or so replaced by RISC OS, which was clearly an extension of the code used in ARTHUR. After another year (about 1990, IIRC), this was upgraded to RISC OS 2, which had many advanced features that would not appear in Windows until Win95, and some that haven't made it there yet. At the time I loved it, but in spite of an active fan base, it will not have a long-term prospect unless rewritten in a high-level language that can be compiled to multiple platforms. Rust would be ideal, but it is probably hard to retrofit RISC OS to the Rust memory model. Maybe it is better to write a new OS from scratch that takes the best elements of RISC OS and adds support for new stuff such as multicore processing and UNICODE.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
