General > Off Topic

A weird, cool idea

<< < (2/4) > >>

jknilinux:
Well, I'm saying that there is no OS. There are only bits of machine code flying around. A PC doesn't need an operating system to run machine code, right?

Numsgil:
CPUs are built with instruction sets, and there are combinations of instruction sets that will cause it to do very bad things.  Computers are purposely built to be fragile.  It's far preferable to crash the computer than cause "undefined behavior", especially that low in the hardware.  All you'd have to do is build an OS that limits the damage a single program can do.  And handles multithreading issues.  CPUs don't natively handle that.  Without an OS you'd be limited to one organism per computer.  All kinds of other issues, it just isn't practical.

jknilinux:
Oh- OK. I understand.
Then, out of curiosity, do you know how CoreWars-8086 can run more than one organism on a simulated x86 computer?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_wars

Ta-183:
Batch processing, perhaps?

jknilinux:
Doesn't batch processing require an OS?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page