A new microkernel, .Net-based operating system is available now. This new and independent operating system, Cosmos, is the effort from the former Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism team member Chad Khudzu Hower. Cosmos (Its only upper case C, ie not COSMOS or CosmOS) is an acronym for C# Open Source Managed Operating System. Even though the name C# is part of the name of Cosmos, Cosmos can work with any .NET language that compiles to pure IL without P/Invokes.
Technically, Cosmos is a set of operating system legos written completely in C# that allow developers to easily build custom OSes with little OS experience by simply selecting new project in Visual Studio, then pressing F5 to build, deploy, and debug. Cosmos comes with a compiler (IL2CPU) that compiles the resulting intermediate language (IL) to X86 code. The compiler includes a cross-platform-support layer and the developer has planned to add support for other processors and platforms. Users can run Cosmos on other platforms such as Wii, iPhone, etc.
Cosmos has a lot of similarity compared to Microsoft’s Singularity. But unlike Singularity, Cosmos is publicly available now with full source code at Codeplex. Anyone can try it and participate in it. Users can read more about Cosmos.
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