With the July 4th Holiday, I enjoyed a 3-day weekend but intentionally limited the time I spent hacking on Wyrm. There’s a lot to unpack in creating a full operating system and toolchain (even with a limited scope). Instead of jumping into full fledged implementation, I took the opportunity to brainstorm and structure the project.

Given we’ve got a hugeeeee amount of work ahead in bootstrapping a kernel and toolchain, the big question becomes “where to start”. For this project, I’ll be trying to maintain a “Test Driven Development” practice. A unit test framework also creates a simplified environment for early development.

The first project milestone will be a “Hello World” constructed kernel from our toolchain. Qemu supports loading a binary ELF image, and most portable toolchains will work with ELF binaries. For the first project milestone, the Wyrm toolchain will construct a valid ELF kernel image with a “Hello World” assembly kernel. With ELF, the Wyrm toolchain may create images for either or fledging OS or the Linux ecosystem. The end-goal is a fully self-hosting system – but until that point, Linux or Windows can provide a host environment.

If someone forced me to select a ‘favorite’ programming language, I’d likely fall into the Python camp. Python does not, unfortunately, make for a good “system” programming language. However, both Julia and Nim advertise some degree of compiled / system programming features. For our toolchain, I’m going to pull a page out of Julia’s playbook and utilize the simplicity of Scheme for compiler and runtime implementation. With a strong Scheme toolchain, I hope to experiment with a maybe-Python / maybe-Scala frontend. With a scheme-work-alike, we can utilize a “proper” scheme implementation to bootstrap the system. I’ve selected “Chicken Scheme”.

With the few commits this weekend, there’s a small test framework and the start of some low level scheme primitives for building ELF files.